Despite the setback, he remained remarkably active and productive. In 1966 a fire destroyed his South Carolina house and studio. He divided his time between homes and studios in New York and Edisto Beach, South Carolina. Over the next decade his diverse work varied in terms of content, medium, and technique as he was inspired by surrealism, dadaism, and minimalism. Evolving Influences and Directionīy 1960 Johns began to study lithography and make prints at Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island, New York, achieving even greater versatility. He became increasingly interested in the work of artist Marcel Duchamp and began to make sculpture. In New York Johns participated with Rauschenberg in artist Allan Kaprow’s Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. The following year his first foreign solo exhibitions were held in Paris, France, and Milan, Italy. Three of his works were included in the Venice Biennale, and he was awarded a prize at the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Museum of Modern Art purchased several of his works out of that show and one, Target with Four Faces, appeared on the January 1958 cover of ARTnews magazine.
His first solo exhibition was held in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. In 1957 the Jewish Museum in New York included a 1955 work by Johns, Green Target, in the exhibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation, marking Johns’s first participation in a museum exhibition. During this time, Johns collaborated with friends in many other fields as well, including composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The two artists also created a point of departure from the movement and allowed their work to evolve beyond it by adding visual puns and pictorial references.
A reaction against abstract expressionism, pop art paid homage to mass media, advertising, and consumer goods. Johns and Rauschenberg heralded the arrival of pop art, a movement that started during the mid-1950s, with work that used familiar objects in new, startling ways. During a 1990 interview, in response to a question about the recurring image of the flag in his work, Johns recounted a childhood memory of his father showing him the statue of William Jasper in Savannah’s Madison Square, which depicts Jasper holding aloft the American flag. He also began painting the American flag, which became a hallmark of his work, followed by paintings of numbers and targets. During this time Johns experimented with painting over collage. In the summer of 1953 Johns returned to New York, where he and fellow southern artist Robert Rauschenberg designed window displays for department stores. He completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother. He spent one year with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina, and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia. Both the town of Jasper and Jasper County are named in the soldier’s honor.) His parents’ marriage was short-lived, and Johns spent his early childhood in Allendale, South Carolina, where he lived with his paternal grandparents. (According to Johns, he and his father may have been named for William Jasper, a sergeant during the Revolutionary War who died in 1779 during the Siege of Savannah. Johns was born in Augusta on May 15, 1930, to Jean Riley and William Jasper Johns. Housed in major museum collections throughout the world, his work is found in Georgia at the Brenau University Galleries in Gainesville and at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta. Over the course of his long career, Johns has produced a complex and challenging body of work, receiving numerous awards and accolades, and exhibiting widely to great acclaim. For more than fifty years, Augusta-born artist Jasper Johns has set a standard for American art.
0 kommentar(er)
