![]() © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at (ARS), New York. Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955, encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 76 × 66 cm. At the Whitney, Johns represents schism at the PMA, continuity. Beauty, it suggests in ironic tones, is a manufactured product, standardized and artificial. ![]() Its corresponding gallery, curated by Scott Rothkopf, focuses on the ‘Savarin’ series (1960–82): 17 ‘Usuyuki’ monotypes of a single composition anchored by a 1960 bronze cast of a coffee can meticulously painted to resemble the real thing. Meanwhile, given the Whitney’s purview of contemporary American art, Johns takes on the air of a radical. Curated by Carlos Basualdo, that museum’s presentation of Johns’s ‘Usuyuki’ prints (1977–79), inspired by Japanese kabuki, is a lovely meditation on fleeting beauty. ![]() At the PMA, an encyclopaedic museum whose collection spans continents and millennia, Johns’s material experimentation appears as an inevitable result of the American project, an invention of the country’s emergent, globally minded, mid-century intelligentsia. Seen this way, the two exhibitions take on different resonances through context and juxtaposition. Johns compels you to acknowledge your experience of the world as an experience of images, and conditions you to understand these signs as fungible in function and malleable in meaning. The museum notes Johns’s interest in how targets direct sight and limit attention, and cites his oft-quoted line that ‘a painting of a flag or target could be seen both as the depiction of something and as the thing itself’, which effectively relays both the exterior and interior functions of his work. The Whitney approaches Johns chronologically, beginning with his iconic series of flag paintings – including Three Flags (1958), usually anchoring a permanent display marking the end of abstract expressionism – as well as his targets and maps, all of which he continues to make today. The curatorial conceit mimics Johns’s work, which is rife with multiples: mirrors (literal and depicted), doubled or tripled motifs, stamps and casts and reproductions. One answer is the fallacy of imitative form. Courtesy: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958, encaustic on canvas (three panels), 78 × 116 cm. Why, then, dedicate so much real estate at two world-class museums to an artist already known for his repetition and self-quotations? In a New York Times profile of Johns, published as a lead-up to the exhibition, the artist’s biographer, Deborah Solomon, stressed the conflict that arose from competing curatorial visions but, ultimately, the differences a general audience will perceive between both presentations are minor, and likely to be insignificant given the lapse they’ll experience between visiting both venues. A gallery at the Whitney focuses on dreams, while a corresponding gallery at the PMA focuses on nightmares the Whitney discusses the American South’s influence on Johns, the PMA Japan’s and so on. Alfred Taubman, Laura–Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum's 50th Anniversary 80.32.In ‘Jasper Johns: Mind / Mirror’, two major museums – the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) – decline to offer fully individual perspectives on the consecrated painter, opting instead to mirror their installations with variations riffing on themes in Johns’s work. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York purchase with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website This exhibition is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Viewed individually or together, the two-part exhibition will offer viewers an immersive, well-rounded, and innovative exploration of the artist’s fundamental working logic, and the many phases, facets, and masterworks of his remarkable ongoing evolution. Inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring and doubles, the two halves of the exhibition will be reflections of one another, featuring themes, methods, and images that echo both within each of the two venues, and between them. Nearly 500 artworks will be shown across the two museums, many of which are from Johns’s personal collection and will be shown publicly for the first time. In an unprecedented collaboration, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York will simultaneously stage a retrospective of Johns’s career, featuring a vast body of work that includes painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, books, and costumes and set design. ![]() Jasper Johns, arguably the single most influential living American artist, has spent his radically inventive, seven-decade career redefining every artistic medium he has worked in.
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