Jasper Johns facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Jasper Johns
Johns receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011
Born	Jasper Johns Jr. (1930-05-15) May 15, 1930 (age 95) Augusta, Georgia, U.S.
Known for	Painting printmaking
Notable work	Flag (1954–55) White Flag (1955) Green Target (1955) Target with Plaster Casts (1955) Target with Four Faces (1955) Three Flags (1958) Numbers in Color (1958–59) Target (1961) Map (1961) Slice (2020)
Movement	Abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, pop art
Awards	(1988) Golden Lion 43rd Venice Biennale (1990) National Medal of Arts (1993) Praemium Imperiale (2011) Presidential Medal of Freedom

Detail of Flag 1954–55, Museum of Modern Art, New York. This image shows how Johns used wax paint over collages of newspaper.

Jasper Johns, born on May 15, 1930, is a famous American artist. He is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Many people see him as a very important artist in American art after World War II. His art style is often linked to movements like abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art.

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in South Carolina. He was a top student in high school. He studied art for a short time at the University of South Carolina. Later, he moved to New York City to study at Parsons School of Design. His studies were paused when he served in the military during the Korean War. After returning to New York in 1953, he met other important artists. One of them was Robert Rauschenberg, who greatly influenced Johns's art.

Johns's art career changed a lot in 1954. He decided to destroy his old artwork. Then, he started making paintings of flags, maps, targets, letters, and numbers. These works made him very famous. His art used familiar symbols, which was different from the Abstract Expressionist style. It made people think about how art shows things. He often used symbols like the American flag. This made his art interesting because it played with what symbols mean. He continued to explore these ideas in his sculptures and prints too.

Jasper Johns has received many honors. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1988. He also received the National Medal of Arts in 1990. In 2011, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973. He also helped start the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Today, Johns lives and works in Connecticut. In 2010, his painting Flag (from 1958) was sold for about $110 million. This made it one of the most expensive artworks ever sold by a living artist at that time.

About Jasper Johns's Life

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia. He spent his early years in Allendale, South Carolina, living with his grandparents. This was after his parents got divorced. He started drawing when he was only three years old. He knew very early that he wanted to be an artist. This was true even though he did not see much art where he grew up. His grandmother, Evalina, painted landscapes. These paintings hung in the homes of his family. They were the only artworks Johns remembers seeing when he was young.

After his grandfather passed away in 1939, Johns lived with his mother and stepfather for a year. This was in Columbia, South Carolina. Then, he spent six years living with his Aunt Gladys near Lake Murray. He spent summer holidays with his father and stepmother. They encouraged his art by buying him materials to draw and paint. He finished high school as the top student in 1947. This was at Edmunds High School in Sumter, South Carolina. He was living with his mother's family again at that time.

Johns studied art for three semesters at the University of South Carolina. This was from 1947 to 1948. His teachers encouraged him to move to New York City. He then briefly studied at the Parsons School of Design in 1949. In 1951, Johns joined the army during the Korean War. He served for two years, first in South Carolina, then in Japan.

After returning to New York in the summer of 1953, Johns worked at Marboro Books. He started meeting artists who would be important to his early career. These included Sari Dienes, Rachel Rosenthal, and Robert Rauschenberg. Johns and Rauschenberg became close friends and artistic partners until 1961. During this time, Johns was also greatly influenced by the dancer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage. They worked together, exploring the art world and sharing their ideas.

In March 1957, a gallery owner named Leo Castelli visited Rauschenberg's studio. He asked to see Johns's art. Castelli later said he saw "a fantastic display of flags and targets." He saw the target with plastic eyes and the one with faces. He also saw a big white flag, a smaller white flag, numbers, and the alphabet. Castelli immediately offered Johns an art show. Johns's first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery was in early 1958. It was very successful. Almost all of his eighteen artworks were sold. Alfred H. Barr Jr., who started New York's Museum of Modern Art, bought three paintings from the show. These were the first works by Johns to be bought by a museum.

Johns has lived and worked in different homes and studios in New York City. From 1973 to 1987, he had a farmhouse with a glass studio in Stony Point, New York. He started visiting the island of Saint Martin in the late 1960s. He bought land there in 1972. Later, he built a home and studio there, designed by Philip Johnson. Johns now lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut.

Johns plans to turn his 170-acre property in Sharon, Connecticut, into a place for artists to live and work. He has lived there since the 1990s. It will offer space for 18 to 24 artists at a time. It will be open to visual artists, poets, musicians, and dancers.

Jasper Johns's Artworks

Painting

In 1954, Johns destroyed all his old artwork. He then started making the paintings he is most famous for. These include pictures of flags, maps, targets, letters, and numbers. Using these symbols made his paintings different from the Abstract Expressionists. Their art often showed the artist's feelings. Johns used well-known images in his art. This meant his paintings could be seen as both real (like a flag) and abstract (like stripes or circles). Some art experts say his choice of subjects helped him focus on other things. Johns once said, "What's interesting to me is the fact that it isn't designed, but taken. It's not mine." He also said these images are "things the mind already knows."

His early painting Flag (1954–55) was made after he dreamed about it. This painting started his new art period. The flag allowed Johns to create a painting that was not fully abstract. It showed a symbol (the American flag). Yet, it also made you notice the design of the symbol itself. The work felt less personal because it showed a national symbol. But it still looked handmade because of Johns's wax brushstrokes. It was not a real flag, nor was it a purely abstract painting. This mix of symbol and material raised many questions without clear answers.

For example, Alfred H. Barr Jr. could not convince the leaders of the Museum of Modern Art to buy Flag directly. They were worried its unclear meaning might cause problems. This was during the Cold War in the late 1950s. But Barr was able to arrange for the architect Philip Johnson to buy the painting. Johnson later gave it to the museum in 1973. The flag remains one of Johns's most important images. An art historian named Roberta Bernstein said that between 1954 and 2002, Johns used the flag in 27 paintings, 10 sculptures, 50 drawings, and 18 prints.

Johns is also known for putting three-dimensional objects in his paintings. These objects could be things he found, like the ruler in Painting with Ruler and "Gray" (1960). Or they could be things he made, like the plaster parts in Target with Four Faces (1955). This way of working challenged the idea that paintings are only flat. Johns often used a method called encaustic. This is an old technique where melted wax mixed with color is applied to a surface. This method allowed Johns to keep the look of individual brushstrokes. It created textured, sometimes see-through, surfaces. Johns's 2020 work Slice copied a drawing of a knee by Jéan-Marc Togodgue. This was a student basketball player near Johns's home. Johns used Togodgue's artwork without telling him first. This led to a disagreement, but it was resolved in a friendly way.

Sculpture

Johns made his first sculpture, Flashlight I, in 1958. Many of his early sculptures were single objects. He made them from a material called Sculp-metal. This was a soft metal that could be shaped like paint or clay. During this time, he also used casting methods to make objects from plaster and bronze. Some of these objects were painted to look very real. For example, Painted Bronze (1960) shows a can painted with a Savarin Coffee label. It is filled with cast paintbrushes. The artwork looks like something you might see on an artist's studio table.

Numbers (2007) shows his well-known pattern of stenciled numbers repeated in a grid. This is the largest single bronze sculpture Johns has made so far. Another sculpture from this time is a two-sided artwork called Fragment of a Letter (2009). It includes part of a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his friend, the artist Émile Bernard. On one side, Johns pressed each letter of van Gogh's words into the wax model. On the other side, he spelled each letter using the American Sign Language alphabet. He used stamps he designed for this. Johns signed the wax model with prints of his own hand. His name was spelled out in two vertical rows using finger spelling.

Prints

Johns started trying out printmaking in 1960. Tatyana Grosman, who started Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc. (ULAE), invited him to her printmaking studio. He began with lithographs that showed common objects and images he was known for. An example is Target (1960). Johns kept working closely with ULAE. He published over 180 prints using different techniques. He used these to explore and improve his existing art ideas. At first, lithography worked well for Johns. It let him create print versions of his famous flags, maps, and targets. In 1971, Johns was the first artist at ULAE to use a special printing press. This led to Decoy, an image that was a print before it became a drawing or painting.

Johns has worked with other printmakers too. He made lithographs and lead reliefs at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. He made screenprints with Hiroshi Kawanishi in New York from 1973–75. He also made intaglios published by Petersburg Press in Paris from 1975–90. This included a project with the writer Samuel Beckett. They created Foirades/Fizzles (1976). This was a book with five text pieces by Beckett in French and English, and 33 intaglios by Johns. He made Cup 2 Picasso for a magazine in 1973. In 2000, he finished 26 linocuts for a book by Jeff Clark. For a magazine in May 2014, he created a black-and-white print. It showed many of his well-known images.

In 1995, Johns hired a master printmaker named John Lund. He began building his own printmaking studio at his home in Connecticut. Low Road Studio officially started in 1997. It is Johns's own company for publishing prints.

Collaborations and Commissions

For many years, Johns worked with others to help Merce Cunningham's Dance Company. He helped Robert Rauschenberg with designs for Cunningham's sets and costumes in the 1950s. In 1963, Johns and John Cage started the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. This group raises money for performance art. Johns continued to support the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He was an artistic advisor from 1967 to 1980. In 1968, Cunningham created a dance piece called Walkaround Time. Johns's set design for this piece copied parts of Marcel Duchamp's artwork The Large Glass.

In 1963, the architect Philip Johnson asked Johns to create a work for the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. The artwork, Numbers (1964), is a large grid of numerals. It was first shown in 1964. It was in the theater's lobby for 35 years. In 1979, the center planned to sell it for $15 million. Numbers is important because it is the largest artwork Johns made using his Numbers theme. Each part of it is on a separate canvas. Many people criticized the plan to sell it. So, the Lincoln Center decided not to sell the work. This was Johns's first and only public art project.

Art Style

Johns's art is sometimes grouped with Neo-Dada and pop art. He uses symbols in the Dada tradition, like the "readymades" of Marcel Duchamp. But unlike many pop artists, such as Andy Warhol, he does not focus on famous people. Other art experts see Johns and Rauschenberg as artists who came before pop art.

Awards and Art Sales

In 1980, the Whitney Museum of American Art bought Three Flags (1958) for $1 million. At that time, this was the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living artist. In 1988, Johns's False Start (1959) was sold at an auction for $17.05 million. This set a new record for the highest price paid for a work by a living artist at auction. It was also the second highest price for any artwork at auction in the U.S. In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought Johns's White Flag (1955). This was the first painting by Johns to join the Met's collection. The museum did not say how much they paid. But the New York Times reported that experts thought it was worth more than $20 million.

In 2006, Johns's False Start (1959) made history again. Private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin bought the work for $80 million. This made it the most expensive painting by a living artist at that time. In 2010, Flag (1958) was sold privately for about $110 million. The seller was Jean-Christophe Castelli, the son of Johns's art dealer. The price was not officially announced. But the New York Times reported that it was around $110 million. On November 11, 2014, a version of Flag from 1983 was sold at auction for $36 million. This set a new auction record for Johns.

Johns has received many awards. In 1969, he received an honorary degree from the University of South Carolina. In 1984, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1988, he won the Golden Lion at the 43rd Venice Biennale. This is a very high honor. Johns became an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1989. In 1990, he received the National Medal of Arts. In 1993, he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting. This is a lifetime achievement award from Japan. He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973. On February 15, 2011, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. He was the first painter or sculptor to receive this award since 1977.

In 2007, the National Gallery of Art bought about 1,700 of Johns's prints. This made the gallery the place with the most Johns artworks in one collection.

Selected Artworks

See also

In Spanish: Jasper Johns para niños