![]() ![]() He attended the University of South Carolina from September 1947 until December 1948, where his instructors included Catharine Rembert, Augusta Rembert Wittkowsky Walsh, and Edmund Yaghjian, all of whom encouraged him to go to New York. ![]() His parents divorced shortly after his birth and, as a result, Johns grew up living with relatives in various towns across his home state of South Carolina. He also continued to make prints and drawings of his finished paintings.Arguably the most famous living American artist, Jasper Johns has built an extraordinary career around the most ordinary subject matter, pursuing and presenting iconic imagery based on familiar objects he describes as “things the mind already knows.” Before his staggering ascent, however, Johns’ roots were rather humble. Exploring the catenary, the curve assumed by a cord hanging freely from two fixed points, Johns adhered strings to painted canvases or drew them beside such familiar motifs as harlequin patterns. ![]() Johns’s work took another direction after his major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in 1996. Changing his style in the 1970s, he produced near-monochrome paintings composed of clusters of parallel lines that he called “crosshatchings.” The paintings he did in the 1980s contain both figural elements and autobiographical references. While continuing to paint numbers, flags, and labels through the early 1960s, he also began to incorporate more fluid brushstrokes and rawer paint textures in such works as Diver (1962). Johns’s unabashed depiction of commonplace emblems and objects was emulated by many Pop Art artists one of Johns’s best-known works is a cast sculpture of two Ballantine Ale cans, Painted Bronze (1960).įrom 1961 Johns began to affix real objects to the surface of his canvases. In their willful and ironic banality and their rejection of emotional expression, these early works were a radical departure from the Abstract Expressionist styles that dominated the American art scene at the time. He was able to raise these objects to the level of icons through his paint handling and an extremely sensitive manipulation of surface texture, which he obtained by the encaustic technique, in which pigments are mixed with hot liquid wax. The paintings Johns went on to produce depict commonplace two-dimensional subjects such as flags, targets, maps, numbers, and letters of the alphabet, all readily recognizable and painted in simple colours.
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