Gray Alphabets

In Gray Alphabets, Johns creates a subtle, ephemeral creation awash in varying tones of gray. Based on Johns’s 1956 painting and works on paper of the same name, Gray Alphabets is solely composed of delicate grayscale tones, in which lowercase letters reminiscent of children’s blocks or a printer’s letterpress are used as abstract cyphers, liberated from the words they routinely compose to roam freely across the paper sheet. The image—so elegant and beguiling in its design imparts the sheen of graphite along with the liquid quality of watercolor. This evocative effect has been described as “printerly” (R. Castleman, Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p. 14). To achieve this result, Johns developed four different matrices and several different shades of gray in order to capture the luminosity he so desired. Others in the edition are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Smithsonian and the British Museum.