Lot Essay
Jasper Johns made this lead relief in response to a question sent to him by Trevor Winkfield, a young British poet and painter who was editing a magazine in Leeds, England in the mid 1960's. Winkfield published Johns's Sketchbook Notes in Juillard 1968-9 and in subsequent correspondence asked Johns about a shape in one of his paintings, suggesting that it resembled a slice of bread. (Johns recalls that it was the outline of part of a chair, others have suggested it is an imprint from Marcel Duchamp's Feuille de vigne, a sculpture owned by Johns.) Johns liked the bread suggestion and made a lead relief print as one of a series using a slice of ordinary white bread as a motif. The lead sheet for the final series was polished and stretched over a plastic former before being cut at the edges and fixed to the wooden backing sheet at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. In this example, the sheet of lead has been pulled over the former with the edges uncut and framed in a shallow metal box to show the process. This suggests that it was made before the edition although the artist cannot recall this. The slice of bread was formed in lead and applied to the surface of the sheet (it is screwed through from the back); Johns added a sheet of paper to the editioned print and overpainted it; here he may have painted the lead sheet itself. The bread is applied higher than the editioned print and the position it finally occupies in the editioned print is written on the back.