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拍品专文
In taking his source material from a comic book almost five years before Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns’s Alley Oop demonstrates the highly inventive nature of his practice during the very early years of the artist’s career. Painted when he was just 28-years-old, Johns distills the simple visuals of the comic strip into a series of painterly brushstrokes, set against a broad field of luminous orange. Its presents, on an intimate scale, Johns’s ideas on objecthood and painting, representing his belief that taking images the mind already knows frees up the viewer to focus on how the object is seen and interpreted. Joining his pantheon of subjects, such as flags, targets, numbers, and letters, the use of a mass market comic book brings that theory to a wider audience. Gifted by Johns to Robert Rauschenberg in the year it was painted, the present work has only had one other owner, with Si Newhouse acquiring the painting in 1988. Included in many of the artist’s most important retrospectives, Alley Oop is regarded as a major early painting and a precursor to a lifetime of innovation and dedication to the practice of painting. As the noted art historian Richard Shiff has said “Along with Johns’s flags, targets, and numerals, Alley Oop instituted a new class of painting…” (“Jasper Johns: Alley Oop, 1958," in Artforum, March 1996, online [accessed: 3/19/2026]).
Set in a field of glowing orange, Johns lays out a tableau of animated colorful brushstrokes. Substantial applications of red, white, blue and yellow pigment are made, seemingly at random, in the upper half of the picture plane. Yet, examine these closely and they begin to coalesce into a more ordered and logical arrangement. Rudimentary figures begin to emerge along with associated forms that suggest some form of narrative arc. Look even closer and it becomes apparent that these marks are applied to a page taken from a comic book, the remains of which are visible through Johns’s applications of paint. These tantalizing glimpses of the original Alley Oop comic strip act to draw the viewer even further into Johns’s painterly discussions about the true nature of painting.
The expansive field of orange pigment that frames this collaged element is a device that Johns used only twice before, in Flag on an Orange Field (1957, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Flag on Orange Field II (1958, Glenstone, Potomac), although in each case the flag has been painted directly onto the canvas and is not a collaged element as in the present work. Shiff acknowledges that this is an important difference, arguing that in deploying the element of collage “Alley Oop becomes a public invitation to passional freedom… Since Johns’ colors are just colors, this allows a viewer to observe freely, in the way Johns observed the cartoon Alley Oop, letting his centered esthetic sense respond to the given patterns, allowing himself to be re-centered in the process—whether confirmed as the same or something different.” As he concludes, “it extends your state of awareness” (ibid.).
In addition to the two “Orange Flag” paintings, the composition of Alley Oop, with its “painting within a painting” arrangement, closely mimics other important works form the period. This insertion of one “object” within another is a device that dates from the very earliest days of Johns’s career. It can be seen most clearly in Target with Four Faces (1955, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), where Johns’s additions include four life masks placed along the upper edge of the canvas, to more metaphorical examples, such as Drawer (1957, The Rose Art Museum, Waltham) and Gray Rectangles (1957) in which a drawer is physically inserted directly into the canvas.
The title of the present work comes from the eponymous syndicated comic strip that was created in December 1932 by the American cartoonist V.T. Hamlin, and which is still running today. It features a cast of colorful characters, their storylines containing a mixture of adventure, fantasy and humor. Alley Oop, the story’s titular character, lives in the prehistoric kingdom of Moo, where he rides his pet dinosaur, carries a stone axe, and wears a fur loincloth. In the present work, Johns takes as his source image an edition where Alley Oop proffers advice to two scientists trying to raise money to build a time machine. Johns takes select cells from the original strip, rearranges them to produce this block of images and then reduces Hamlin’s illustrations to a series of bold, singular brushstrokes. Thus, the already simplified iconography of the comic book is further reduced into a rich tapestry of expressive marks. This demonstrates what Whitney director Scott Rothkopf identified as Johns’s dueling concerns of “disappearance” and “negation” that consumed him during this pivotal period (Jasper Johns Mind/Mirror, exh. cat., Whitney Musuem of American Art, New York and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021, p. 29).
This particular source material was clearly consequential for both Johns and Rauschenberg. For the former, it offered him the impetus to break from the predominantly monochromatic palette which he favored up to this point. Rauschenberg recalled, “[Alley Oop] had a kind of family history because [Johns] lived above me and came down one morning and said, ‘I can’t paint in more than one color at a time.’ And that’s serious; that’s a serious problem” (quoted in R. Rauschenberg and D. Saff, “A Conversation about Art and Roci” in M. Yakush, ed., ROCI: Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1991, p. 156). For Rauschenberg, it also proved an interesting material as he used pages from an Alley Oop comic in two of his iconic combines, Collection (1954, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and Charlene (1954, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam).
Johns’s Alley Oop has been included in several of the artist’s most important exhibitions. It was first exhibited in his seminal early exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1964. Describing the artist as “very much in the ascendent,” the New York Times’s critic astutely identified the complexity of Johns’s work, saying “He tears up their old cards of identity and issues new ones. Just how he does this cannot easily be explained, it being a largely a matter of intensity of psychological focus… when he turns to… things capable of extended meanings, he drives them home in an electrifying way” (quoted in “Jewish Museum Opens Exhibition Tomorrow” in The New York Times, 15 February 1964, online [accessed: 3/25/2026]). Subsequently, the painting was also shown in the artist’s influential first European exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1965, and latterly at the artist’s last major retrospective, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror organized jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2021.
Johns is one of the twentieth-century’s most prolific and innovative artists. Unrivalled within the artistic canon of the postwar period, he has done more than any other artist to interrogate the creativity of the artistic process, resulting in a body of work that is as vital and invigorating as it is broad. Johns is the master of his chosen medium, excited by their formal properties and investigating and manipulating them to push at the boundaries of art. Along with Robert Rauschenberg, he ignited the idea that would lead to American Pop Art and the subsequent movements beyond. Paintings such as Alley Oop strike a careful balance between their status as universal icons and the more personal, intimate pull that they elicit in each individual viewer. “Johns’s art is a constant reminder that the truth is not a given,” concludes Roberta Bernstein and Edith Devaney, “but rather is revealed through the layered and shifting meanings uncovered through the process of perception. Fixed habits of seeing, feeling, and thinking render the truth invisible. A flicker of grace occurs when the senses are awakened and new ways of experiencing the world, even ordinary objects in the world, provide a glimpse of that truth” (quoted in “Something Resembling Truth,” in R. Bernstein, ed., Jasper Johns, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2018, p. 12).
Set in a field of glowing orange, Johns lays out a tableau of animated colorful brushstrokes. Substantial applications of red, white, blue and yellow pigment are made, seemingly at random, in the upper half of the picture plane. Yet, examine these closely and they begin to coalesce into a more ordered and logical arrangement. Rudimentary figures begin to emerge along with associated forms that suggest some form of narrative arc. Look even closer and it becomes apparent that these marks are applied to a page taken from a comic book, the remains of which are visible through Johns’s applications of paint. These tantalizing glimpses of the original Alley Oop comic strip act to draw the viewer even further into Johns’s painterly discussions about the true nature of painting.
The expansive field of orange pigment that frames this collaged element is a device that Johns used only twice before, in Flag on an Orange Field (1957, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Flag on Orange Field II (1958, Glenstone, Potomac), although in each case the flag has been painted directly onto the canvas and is not a collaged element as in the present work. Shiff acknowledges that this is an important difference, arguing that in deploying the element of collage “Alley Oop becomes a public invitation to passional freedom… Since Johns’ colors are just colors, this allows a viewer to observe freely, in the way Johns observed the cartoon Alley Oop, letting his centered esthetic sense respond to the given patterns, allowing himself to be re-centered in the process—whether confirmed as the same or something different.” As he concludes, “it extends your state of awareness” (ibid.).
In addition to the two “Orange Flag” paintings, the composition of Alley Oop, with its “painting within a painting” arrangement, closely mimics other important works form the period. This insertion of one “object” within another is a device that dates from the very earliest days of Johns’s career. It can be seen most clearly in Target with Four Faces (1955, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), where Johns’s additions include four life masks placed along the upper edge of the canvas, to more metaphorical examples, such as Drawer (1957, The Rose Art Museum, Waltham) and Gray Rectangles (1957) in which a drawer is physically inserted directly into the canvas.
The title of the present work comes from the eponymous syndicated comic strip that was created in December 1932 by the American cartoonist V.T. Hamlin, and which is still running today. It features a cast of colorful characters, their storylines containing a mixture of adventure, fantasy and humor. Alley Oop, the story’s titular character, lives in the prehistoric kingdom of Moo, where he rides his pet dinosaur, carries a stone axe, and wears a fur loincloth. In the present work, Johns takes as his source image an edition where Alley Oop proffers advice to two scientists trying to raise money to build a time machine. Johns takes select cells from the original strip, rearranges them to produce this block of images and then reduces Hamlin’s illustrations to a series of bold, singular brushstrokes. Thus, the already simplified iconography of the comic book is further reduced into a rich tapestry of expressive marks. This demonstrates what Whitney director Scott Rothkopf identified as Johns’s dueling concerns of “disappearance” and “negation” that consumed him during this pivotal period (Jasper Johns Mind/Mirror, exh. cat., Whitney Musuem of American Art, New York and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021, p. 29).
This particular source material was clearly consequential for both Johns and Rauschenberg. For the former, it offered him the impetus to break from the predominantly monochromatic palette which he favored up to this point. Rauschenberg recalled, “[Alley Oop] had a kind of family history because [Johns] lived above me and came down one morning and said, ‘I can’t paint in more than one color at a time.’ And that’s serious; that’s a serious problem” (quoted in R. Rauschenberg and D. Saff, “A Conversation about Art and Roci” in M. Yakush, ed., ROCI: Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1991, p. 156). For Rauschenberg, it also proved an interesting material as he used pages from an Alley Oop comic in two of his iconic combines, Collection (1954, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and Charlene (1954, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam).
Johns’s Alley Oop has been included in several of the artist’s most important exhibitions. It was first exhibited in his seminal early exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1964. Describing the artist as “very much in the ascendent,” the New York Times’s critic astutely identified the complexity of Johns’s work, saying “He tears up their old cards of identity and issues new ones. Just how he does this cannot easily be explained, it being a largely a matter of intensity of psychological focus… when he turns to… things capable of extended meanings, he drives them home in an electrifying way” (quoted in “Jewish Museum Opens Exhibition Tomorrow” in The New York Times, 15 February 1964, online [accessed: 3/25/2026]). Subsequently, the painting was also shown in the artist’s influential first European exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1965, and latterly at the artist’s last major retrospective, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror organized jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2021.
Johns is one of the twentieth-century’s most prolific and innovative artists. Unrivalled within the artistic canon of the postwar period, he has done more than any other artist to interrogate the creativity of the artistic process, resulting in a body of work that is as vital and invigorating as it is broad. Johns is the master of his chosen medium, excited by their formal properties and investigating and manipulating them to push at the boundaries of art. Along with Robert Rauschenberg, he ignited the idea that would lead to American Pop Art and the subsequent movements beyond. Paintings such as Alley Oop strike a careful balance between their status as universal icons and the more personal, intimate pull that they elicit in each individual viewer. “Johns’s art is a constant reminder that the truth is not a given,” concludes Roberta Bernstein and Edith Devaney, “but rather is revealed through the layered and shifting meanings uncovered through the process of perception. Fixed habits of seeing, feeling, and thinking render the truth invisible. A flicker of grace occurs when the senses are awakened and new ways of experiencing the world, even ordinary objects in the world, provide a glimpse of that truth” (quoted in “Something Resembling Truth,” in R. Bernstein, ed., Jasper Johns, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2018, p. 12).
