Jasper Johns

Three flags

False Start

Jasper Johns (born in 1930 at Augusta, Georgia) is an icon of American Art.

Raised in Allendale, South Carolina, Jasper Johns grew up wanting to be an artist. "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant," recounts Johns. "I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different from the one that I was in." He studied briefly at the University of South Carolina before moving to New York in the early fifties.

The early career of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) had an immense impact on the subsequent development of advanced art—pop, minimal, process, conceptual, and performance genres, among others—in the United States and Europe. [1]

The modern art community was searching for new ideas to succeed the pure emotionality of the Abstract Expressionists. Johns' paintings of targets, maps, invited both the wrath and praise of critics. Johns' early work combined a serious concern for the craft of painting with an everyday, almost absurd, subject matter. The meaning of the painting could be found in the painting process itself. It was a new experience for gallery goers to find paintings solely of such things as flags and numbers. The simplicity and familiarity of the subject matter piqued viewer interest in both Johns' motivation and his process.

It was through painting that Johns found his own process for trying to understand logic.

Jasper Johns's artworks are some of the most expensive for a living artist.

Diver, 1962

See also[edit]

• American Painting
• Gallery of American Masterpieces

External links[edit]

• Jasper Johns
• Jasper Johns (born 1930). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.