Searching for Jasper Johns

...And, if the job utilizes graphic skills, it usually leaves its mark on the personal work...

...He did, of course, transform Old Glory from symbol to icon, and give new significance to light bulbs and numbers...

...Hazy as well is the part played by Robert Rauschenberg in this stage of Johns' development...

...I like," he stated, "what Duchamp said, that a title should be like another color in the work...

...Elated as the artist was with his critical and financial success, he responded by strengthening the irony implicit in his work (thus the sculpture The Critic Smiles, where a toothbrush has teeth instead of bristles...

...A Texan, Rauschenberg had already made his mark as an insurgent against Abstract Expressionism when Johns met him in the early '50s...

...I decided to stop becoming and be an artist...

...High art does not feed upon high art alone...

...Incidentally, Johns tells the author that he has what may be a physiological problem with colors: He finds that as he works with them they blend optically into gray...

...In fact, getting the right kind of occasional job requires connections with the old-boy network that artists run...

...A mockery rather than a criticism of Abstract Expressionism, this canvas consists of patches of red, orange, yellow, blue, and white, each one duly labeled as such by lettering stenciled on in contrasting colors...

...Whether or not America is unique in resenting or ignoring or overattending its artists, there does seem to be something in the cultural landscape here that produces in them the peculiarly defensive attitude expressed by Johns...

...It is not clear whether the destruction preceded or was perhaps triggered by a dream of himself painting a large American flag...

...In fact, Crichton gives no indication of having interviewed the older artist...

...For since such an existence does not provide the chunks of uninterrupted time the pursuit of art demands, it calls for mono-maniacal self-discipline...

...Acceptance, in any event, came quickly for Johns: By 1959 he had a significant reputation, three pictures in the Museum of Modern Art, a prize from the Carnegie International, and—most vital of all—exposure in Time magazine...

...At the same time, his art seemed to feed upon itself, becoming extremely complex in its symbolism and plays on words...

...There are a number of beautiful pieces on display, especially among the monochromatic prints...

...Sometimes they actually painted each other's works, and the result of the cross-pollination was that later on they were treated as a two-man avant-garde...

...He finally met Duchamp in 1959, and one may reasonably conclude that in Painted Bronze, an imitation readymade of Ballantine Ale cans, Johns showed a new confidence born of contact with the founder of Dada...

...Well, I begin at the beginning...

...As he himself has put it, "I found that I couldn't do anything that would be identical with my feelings, so I worked in such a way that I could say it's not me...

...That the author accomplishes a readable survey is a measure of his skill...

...while often strong, it is as emotionless as the spectrum scale that occasionally adorns the borders of the paintings...

...That project lasted for a single day at Hunter College, then he went to work in a bookstore and painted in his spare time...

...the self-conscious artist who proceeds by intuition...

...This is surely the case with Johns and Rauschenberg: Their highly visible talent for display must have been nurtured by their department-store experience...

...Though it may be one paradox too many, Johns does not seem to me a primarily visual artist...

...Nevertheless, Johns' provocative remoteness is more a personal than a national trait...

...Whatever the case, it was also in 1954 that he produced the first of the flags that, with his targets, were to bring him a solo show and immediate acclaim at the new Castelli Gallery in 1958...

...Most interestingly, despite his obviously having gone a long way on the Duchamp trail, Johns had not even heard of the master until he was in his mid-20s...

...During the '50s, Johns had made ordinary objects extraordinary—to begin with, simply by having the idea of choosing them, and then by enhancing them through his technique...

...He was the first person Johns knew "whose life was geared to painting," and he may have inspired the decision to be an artist...

...He is as unconcerned with the future as he is vague about the past, we learn from this book, and deals with life and art in a methodical, almost disassociated manner, like someone acting as a surrogate for himself...

...the ascetic who is a marvellous cook...

...Apparently Johns steered clear of the abyss, but his art has remained obscure: To attempt a summary of Crichton's summary of the ouevre is to be snatched into a vortex of puns, double entendres, dreams, and other recondite source material...

...Crichton does not mention some other characteristics of the canvases of the period: an odd mixture of the hermetic and the expressionistic, plus some almost nostalgic references to Rauschenberg in the form of objects attached to pictures, like a broom in Fool's House...

...Soon after Johns' birth in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, his parents divorced...

...Both are apparent, too, in his discourse, notably in the literal responses he gives to questions ("How do you work on a painting...

...the intellectual who will not explain himself in intellectual terms...

...Crichton says that Rauschenberg showed Johns the survival ropes, introducing him to the idea of working only when he needed to...

...Unfortunately, as the series of paradoxes may forewarn, the tantalizing artist—who has said "I am just trying to find a way to make pictures"—remains an enigma when one has finished Crichton's book...

...Crichton has produced a compendium of almost all that can be known about Jasper Johns, and if the artist is as mystifying as ever, he has only himself to blame—or congratulate...

...Beleaguerment was implicit in Pollock's pugnacity, and both the jocularity of artists from Homer to Stuart Davis to Alexander Calder, and the deadpan stance taken by Johns and such Pop descendants as Warhol, are peculiarly American...

...By 1955, the two were close friends, living in the same loft building and seeing each other every day...

...Crichton feels that if Johns had pursued this course much further, he "would have inevitably declined into either immobility, total paralysis—or the indecipherable internal references of schizophrenia...

...In many ways, they are what his work is about...

...The forces that prompted him to destroy virtually all of his paintings in 1954 are explained in a typical simplification: "I decided that I could be going to become an artist forever, all my life...

...Although exact opposites in temperament—Rauschenberg being aggressive and Johns reserved—they shared an approach to art, including "the belief that the hard distinction between representation and abstraction masked an ambiguous area of great interest...

...the man who has been called both generous and perverse...

...These contrasts are not only striking...

...Following a childhood spent mostly with various relatives in South Carolina, a year and a half in college and two more in the Army, Johns moved to New York to continue his education...

...certainly there are intimations of conflict and its companion, hostility, in Johns...

...It should be noted, too, that for most artists the subsistence life is not as spontaneous or "free" as some would have us think...

...Precisely because Johns is difficult to penetrate, it is almost essential to supplement Crichton's book with the current (through January 17) retrospective at the Whitney Museum...

...The author of The Andromeda Strain and other popular novels, a friend of Johns' and collector of his work, has set the scene admirably...

...I doubt whether even in the '50s just anyone could drop by Bonwit Teller's or Tiffany's to dress windows, as Crichton hints Rauschenberg and Johns did...

...That accounts for the separation...

...Yet instead of coming away from the Whitney with memories of conjunctions of shapes and colors, one emerges as if from a gigantic test of one's own perceptions...

...the man who says that most of his life is haphazard and accidental, but who allows no accidents in his pictures...

...In the process, the fiddling and rather sentimental surface of his encaustic paintings gave way to a bolder technique in oil, as typified by False Start...

...The choice of imagery, its placement, the irregular shape and sometimes vast size of the canvases all speak of an interior life of great urgency—not the unflappable meta-physicist conjured by Crichton's prose...

...Having explored the banality of everyday objects, Johns was now turning to the banality of public adulation...

...the tendency to obliqueness and the tendency to literalness...

...At the start of the next decade, he continued to work in this manner— with light bulbs, numbers and so forth —but having now read Wittgenstein, he became engrossed with meaning in general and began paying special attention to his titles...

...Michael Crichton sees something of both Harry Houdini and Adlai Stevenson in his subject...

...The color is particularly disconcerting...

...The cumulative effect, however, is disturbing...

...Like the magician, Johns is forever forcing himself into impossible situations so that he can display his skill at self-extrication...

...And like the politican, he is "extraordinarily intelligent, so deeply aware of his choices, that he perpetually risks frozen indecision...

...the creator of enigmatic work based upon mundane imagery...

...The suggestion that this was easy points to a frequent fault of artists' biographies, where economics, a key influence on creative development, is seldom mentioned except in the vaguest of terms...

...As a cofather of Pop, Johns prepared the intellectual ground for the movement much more than he contributed to its visual impact...

...Possibly the strain of hesitancy is evidence more of strife than intelligence...

...the artist who undoubtedly strives to create doubts...

...On Art SEARCHING FOR JASPER JOHNS BY VIVIEN RAYNOR The first chapter of Michael Crichton's Jasper Johns (Abrams, 276 pp., $28.50) ends with this composite portrait of the artist: "The contrasts are striking—the reclusive logician who can be charming and outgoing...