![]() ![]() ![]() In the paintings, Johns presents images that move into the realm of objects and wrestle with the validity of representation as a philosophical concept. Jasper Johns’s groundbreaking 1958 installation at the Leo Castelli Gallery of his famous target and flag works changed the current of New York painting and had an extraordinary impact on contemporary art. A critic of the time encapsulated this painting’s ambivalence, asking, “Is this a flag or a painting?” The American flag is something “the mind already knows,” Johns has said, but its execution complicates the representation and invites close inspection. ![]() The newspaper scraps visible beneath the stripes and forty-eight stars lend this icon historical specificity. “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag,” Johns has said of this work, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” Those materials included three canvases that he mounted on plywood, strips of newspaper, and encaustic paint-a mixture of pigment and molten wax that has formed a surface of lumps and smears. In this work, Johns demonstrates why he is one of the 20th-century’s master printmakers by doubling the flag to call attention to the variations in his handling, such as different brushstrokes and drops of tusche–a greasy liquid used to create a painterly quality in prints. For his commemorative print, the artist appropriately returned to the flag as a subject. In 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art received Jasper Johns’ iconic encaustic painting Three Flags (1958) as a gift for their 50th anniversary. This print is signed and dated in the lower right and numbered in the lower left. Jasper Johns, Two Flags (Whitney Museum of American Art 50th Anniversary) is an original lithograph featuring two American Flags in their iconic red, white, and blues. ![]()
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