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拍品专文
In late 1954, Jasper Johns famously destroyed all the existing artworks he had made up to that point. He was ready, he said, to “stop becoming an artist and to be an artist…what I wanted to do was to find out what I did that other people didn’t, what I was that other people weren’t” (quoted in “Flag (1954-55),” MoMA website, online [accessed: 3/18/2026]). Figure 2 was one of the first works that Johns completed in this search for the true purpose of his art. Painted in 1955, the present work is only the second of his famed Figure paintings (the first, Figure 1, is in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne), and it is one of only four white paintings of single figures that he ever painted. By using paper collage and encaustic in his depiction of the familiar curvaceous form of the figure 2, Johns was able to focus not on what he painted, but how he painted it. In this respect, along with his Flags, Targets, and Alphabets, Johns’s Figures have become an important contribution to the dialogue surrounding the meaning of art in the twentieth century.
In both composition and execution, the present work is an intimate and sophisticated essay on the nature of painting. Seemingly simple in its execution, it is in fact a considered and revolutionary reappraisal of many of the aspects of painting that have been taken for granted over the centuries. The flowing form of the number is familiar to all, with Johns choosing a particularly elegant version of the form with which to launch his painterly investigation. Johns builds up the appearance of the figure by layering down collaged paper elements taken from several different books and other sources. The rudimentary and seemingly arbitrary nature of these torn pieces of paper contrasts delightfully with the purity and elegance of the stenciled figure. This combination is then further embellished with a layer of white encaustic, shrouding the form of the figure in a diaphanous veil of evocative white. The highly active nature of the way in which Johns applies this painterly layer—leaving some areas generously covered in pigment, while others less so—draws attention to the very nature of its application, and allows Johns to consider this canvas not as a painting of the figure two, but rather as a painting of the essential elements of painting. This frisson is the result of these simple elements being greater than the sum of their parts. As the critic Leo Steinberg wrote: “The elements of Johns’s picture lie side by side like flint pebbles. Rubbed together they could spark a flame” (“Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, Chicago, 1972, p. 19).
Figure 2 pits the mind and the eye against one another, producing a system that undoes and then proceeds to rebuild logic. On one level, the present work is a flat form rendered in nuanced white tonalities. Catherine Craft explicates in a monograph on Johns: “In selecting recognizable subjects, Johns seemed to reject prevailing abstract modes of painting, yet his subjects themselves—flags, targets, numbers—each possessed a vital characteristic of classical abstraction, namely a flatness rendering them all indistinguishable from the picture plane itself” (Jasper Johns, New York, 2009, p. 10). This work can be viewed as an allover nonrepresentational field, a flat plane that draws attention to its hand worked surface. Yet the mind, primed and anxious to draw meaning from the abstraction, picks out the figure 2, identifying the recognizable, logical form. The half-life of this logic quickly breaks down once more, as the highly worked encaustic surface seeks to subsume the “subject” of Johns’s painting. Poet John Yau has noted that Johns’s aesthetic approach takes construction and deconstruction as two sides of the same coin: “It is Johns’s belief that both form and dissolution must be present in his work that underlies all his choices” (“Jasper Johns’s Preoccupation” in The American Poetry Review, vol. 35, no. 1, January/February 2006, p. 44).
As an early example of this way of thinking, Figure 2 has been included in many of the artist’s most important exhibitions. It was first exhibited in 1964, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, in what would become a seminal exhibition. The Whitechapel was one of the first galleries to exhibit Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and would go on to forge a reputation as an institution that organized and supported trailblazing exhibitions. In 1964 it organized Jasper Johns: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures, 1954-1964, an exhibition which helped to cement Johns’s reputation, along with his transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and Neo-Dada, to an international audience. More recently, Figure 2 was exhibited in the artist’s largest exhibition to date, the 2021 Mind/Mirror retrospective organized jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and an exhibition The New York Times described as “not just a blockbuster, but a blockbuster x 2” (H. Cotter, “Jasper Johns: Divide and Conquer” in The New York Times, 23 September 2021, online [accessed: 3/18/2026]). Figure 2 was exhibited in the Philadelphia presentation alongside other Numbers paintings from across the decades, an installation which the Times described as “celebrating formal variety and conceptual subtlety” (ibid.).
The present work is one of four single white numbers that Johns has painted. Figure 1, the first in the series, is in the permanent collection of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Number 5 remains in the collection of the artist, and Figure 7, the final white painting, is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. There are seventeen single Figure paintings in total, nine of which are in institutional collections. Once Johns completed the first four in white encaustic, he moved onto depicting the remaining examples in gray and other colors.
Throughout his career, and through his wide-ranging interest in different media, Johns was fundamentally interested in issues of representation. Bridging the gap between abstraction and Pop, he sought inspiration in the forms and images that he saw around him. Yet he differed from other artists of his generation in that his interest in the iconography of his chosen subject matter is based on their formal associations and how that changes (or not) in the context of their use in art. Of Johns’s work, the curator Roberta Bernstein noted, “Their subjects were not drawn from the topical mass media but were intrinsic to culture and deeply ingrained in human consciousness. Their uncertain status, hovering between art work and the thing itself, focused attention on the process of perception, how reality is represented through visual signs, and how the viewer interprets those signs. In this, they did not so much reject abstraction and subjectivity as forge a new way to integrate abstraction with representation and make more apparent the viewer’s role in investing the art work with meaning” (“Jasper Johns’s Numbers: Uncertain Signs” in R. Bernstein and C.E. Foster, eds., Jasper Johns: Numbers, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003, p. 12). By peering into the underlying structure of the very world that supported his practice, Johns gave rise to new inquiries into the nature of art and produced some of the most celebrated works of our time.
In both composition and execution, the present work is an intimate and sophisticated essay on the nature of painting. Seemingly simple in its execution, it is in fact a considered and revolutionary reappraisal of many of the aspects of painting that have been taken for granted over the centuries. The flowing form of the number is familiar to all, with Johns choosing a particularly elegant version of the form with which to launch his painterly investigation. Johns builds up the appearance of the figure by layering down collaged paper elements taken from several different books and other sources. The rudimentary and seemingly arbitrary nature of these torn pieces of paper contrasts delightfully with the purity and elegance of the stenciled figure. This combination is then further embellished with a layer of white encaustic, shrouding the form of the figure in a diaphanous veil of evocative white. The highly active nature of the way in which Johns applies this painterly layer—leaving some areas generously covered in pigment, while others less so—draws attention to the very nature of its application, and allows Johns to consider this canvas not as a painting of the figure two, but rather as a painting of the essential elements of painting. This frisson is the result of these simple elements being greater than the sum of their parts. As the critic Leo Steinberg wrote: “The elements of Johns’s picture lie side by side like flint pebbles. Rubbed together they could spark a flame” (“Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, Chicago, 1972, p. 19).
Figure 2 pits the mind and the eye against one another, producing a system that undoes and then proceeds to rebuild logic. On one level, the present work is a flat form rendered in nuanced white tonalities. Catherine Craft explicates in a monograph on Johns: “In selecting recognizable subjects, Johns seemed to reject prevailing abstract modes of painting, yet his subjects themselves—flags, targets, numbers—each possessed a vital characteristic of classical abstraction, namely a flatness rendering them all indistinguishable from the picture plane itself” (Jasper Johns, New York, 2009, p. 10). This work can be viewed as an allover nonrepresentational field, a flat plane that draws attention to its hand worked surface. Yet the mind, primed and anxious to draw meaning from the abstraction, picks out the figure 2, identifying the recognizable, logical form. The half-life of this logic quickly breaks down once more, as the highly worked encaustic surface seeks to subsume the “subject” of Johns’s painting. Poet John Yau has noted that Johns’s aesthetic approach takes construction and deconstruction as two sides of the same coin: “It is Johns’s belief that both form and dissolution must be present in his work that underlies all his choices” (“Jasper Johns’s Preoccupation” in The American Poetry Review, vol. 35, no. 1, January/February 2006, p. 44).
As an early example of this way of thinking, Figure 2 has been included in many of the artist’s most important exhibitions. It was first exhibited in 1964, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, in what would become a seminal exhibition. The Whitechapel was one of the first galleries to exhibit Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and would go on to forge a reputation as an institution that organized and supported trailblazing exhibitions. In 1964 it organized Jasper Johns: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures, 1954-1964, an exhibition which helped to cement Johns’s reputation, along with his transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and Neo-Dada, to an international audience. More recently, Figure 2 was exhibited in the artist’s largest exhibition to date, the 2021 Mind/Mirror retrospective organized jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and an exhibition The New York Times described as “not just a blockbuster, but a blockbuster x 2” (H. Cotter, “Jasper Johns: Divide and Conquer” in The New York Times, 23 September 2021, online [accessed: 3/18/2026]). Figure 2 was exhibited in the Philadelphia presentation alongside other Numbers paintings from across the decades, an installation which the Times described as “celebrating formal variety and conceptual subtlety” (ibid.).
The present work is one of four single white numbers that Johns has painted. Figure 1, the first in the series, is in the permanent collection of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Number 5 remains in the collection of the artist, and Figure 7, the final white painting, is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. There are seventeen single Figure paintings in total, nine of which are in institutional collections. Once Johns completed the first four in white encaustic, he moved onto depicting the remaining examples in gray and other colors.
Throughout his career, and through his wide-ranging interest in different media, Johns was fundamentally interested in issues of representation. Bridging the gap between abstraction and Pop, he sought inspiration in the forms and images that he saw around him. Yet he differed from other artists of his generation in that his interest in the iconography of his chosen subject matter is based on their formal associations and how that changes (or not) in the context of their use in art. Of Johns’s work, the curator Roberta Bernstein noted, “Their subjects were not drawn from the topical mass media but were intrinsic to culture and deeply ingrained in human consciousness. Their uncertain status, hovering between art work and the thing itself, focused attention on the process of perception, how reality is represented through visual signs, and how the viewer interprets those signs. In this, they did not so much reject abstraction and subjectivity as forge a new way to integrate abstraction with representation and make more apparent the viewer’s role in investing the art work with meaning” (“Jasper Johns’s Numbers: Uncertain Signs” in R. Bernstein and C.E. Foster, eds., Jasper Johns: Numbers, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003, p. 12). By peering into the underlying structure of the very world that supported his practice, Johns gave rise to new inquiries into the nature of art and produced some of the most celebrated works of our time.
