Review of 'Jasper Johns: Regrets,' a New Series at MoMa
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A Lens Catches; a Painter Converts

‘Jasper Johns: Regrets,’ a New Series at MoMA

MARCH 21, 2014

What do you do if you’re a busy museum, and an eminent and famously enigmatic artist in late career tells you he’s prepared to go public with new work? You shake up your schedule, clear out some space and move the stuff in, pronto.

That’s more or less what the Museum of Modern Art did for its straight-from-the studio show called “Jasper Johns: Regrets.” Haste can make waste. It can also make magic. And magic, of a peculiarly somber, meditative kind, is what we have here.

A little over a year and a half ago, Mr. Johns, 83, was looking through a Christie’s London sales catalog of work by the British artist Francis Bacon and came across photographs of the painter Lucian Freud. They had been taken in 1964 by the photographer John Deakin at the request of Bacon, who was planning to do a portrait of Freud but didn’t like working with live models. (Bacon’s triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” sold for $142 million last year.)

One photo in particular caught Mr. Johns’s eye. In it, Freud is sitting on a quilt-covered brass bed in the corner of a room with soiled walls. He has one leg folded under the other; his head is bowed, his face obscured by a raised hand. His stoop-shouldered, folded-in pose suggests exhaustion, despair. He could be weeping.

The sense of abjection was compounded by the distressed condition of the photographic print, found in Bacon’s cluttered studio after his death in 1992. It had seen hard use. It had been creased and stained with paint; a large, roughly rectangular section of its lower left corner had been torn and folded back, and secured with a paper clip. (The original print, on loan from the Bacon estate, is in the MoMA show.)

It is on this photograph — not just the image of Freud, but the beat-up print itself — that Mr. Johns has based a cohesive group of nearly two dozen painting, drawings and prints. The precise appeal the picture held for him is hard to pin down. But then, the impulses behind much of his work have been complicated and elusive: a childhood memory, a dream, a detail from an old master painting, or from his own work. His choices of subjects have felt both arbitrary and deliberate, prosaic and loaded, like Duchamp ready-mades.

More important than the images he chooses, though, is what he does with them, the formal and conceptual changes he puts them through. And to the “Regrets” series he has brought a full arsenal of transforming maneuvers used in the past.

As always, in developing a series, he juggles several media, including oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, graphite, colored pencil, ink on paper, ink on plastic, printing ink and photocopying. And his idea of doing variations on a theme is close to dissection: cutting an image open, picking apart its essence, moving bits around, throwing some out, squeezing others into new shapes, in the end restoring wholeness, but not in its initial form.

The show — organized by the MoMA curators Christophe Cherix and Ann Temkin, with Ingrid Langston, a curatorial assistant — is a record of such a process, and its value, as such, is far greater than that of any single work in it, painting or otherwise.

One of the earliest pieces is a small, unemphatic pencil sketch of the Bacon print, with Freud’s figure simplified, and the missing lower corner rendered as a solid dark shape. Three words written in ink below the drawing — “Goya? Bats? Dreams?” — suggest at least one feature that drew Mr. Johns to the picture, an association with art history. Freud’s face-hiding pose somewhat resembles that of the artist who sits dozing away, swarmed by owls and bats, in “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” the renowned etching by Francisco Goya, an artist Mr. Johns has long admired.

With a second early piece, “Study for Regrets,” an intense manipulation of material begins. Here, Freud’s figure has been doubled into facing mirror images, with the one on the right painted as a kind of jigsaw puzzle of colored fragments. And new elements have been added: the word “Regrets” and a scribbled signature, both looking handwritten, but, in reality, produced with an inked stamp that Mr. Johns designed to reply to social invitations.

At this point, we’re on familiar Johns turf, defined by a mix of high and low, serious and humorous, its essence distilled in a gloomster Freud decked out in harlequin colors. But the tone soon shifts, darkens. In other drawings, Freud’s figures recede in prominence, and, again in mirror reflection, the dark shapes representing the torn section of the print merge into a Rorschach-like whole, a large rectangle that sits at the center of the composition.

A shape that was once an indicator of emptiness is now, suddenly, a monument, somewhat architectural, with its two pronglike turrets, but also, increasingly, funereal. As the series grows, moving from drawings into paintings, and then into prints, Freud’s figures become mere tangles of line, and from those tangles another image emerges: a human skull with big, empty eyes. It rests on top of the dark rectangle, which now might be read as the door of a tomb, opened onto blackness, oblivion.

Skulls have turned up in Mr. Johns’s work since the early 1960s. Some scholars say they’ve been inspired by the skulls that frequently appear in the still lifes of one his favorite artists, Cézanne. Another explanation may simply be that Mr. Johns is one of the few contemporary artists who has persisted, over a long career, in taking mortality seriously as a subject. And he has become more forthright in concentrating on it, and personalizing it, over time.

In this regard, his art can feel almost Victorian, a sensibility America still doesn’t understand, which may explain arguments that Mr. Johns’s work is obscurant and repressed. When I think “Victorian,” I think Melville and Dickinson: passionate, sardonic moral thinkers, too in love with beauty to be morbid. I see Mr. Johns in that light. Much of “Regrets” is really beautiful, with half-hidden rainbow colors, tonal subtleties and a mesmerizing diversity of line.

Because of the title of the series, and the fact that an octogenarian produced it, there’s a tendency to view the show as a valedictory gesture, the end of something. But it doesn’t feel that way at all. It feels assured and centered, quiet but with lots of give, sagely alive.

“Jasper Johns: Regrets” continues through Sept. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art; 212-708-9400, moma.org.

Art & Design

Emilia Azcárate: ‘Liminal’

MARCH 13, 2014

“Untitled,” 2012, from the series “Practicables,” by Emilia Azcárate, at Henrique Faria. Henrique Faria, New York

Art in Review

By HOLLAND COTTER

Henrique Faria Fine Art

35 East 67th Street, fourth floor,

Manhattan

Through March 22

Developments in Emilia Azcárate’s art appear to reflect changes in her spiritual life. Born in Venezuela in 1964, now living in Spain, Ms. Azcárate was raised Roman Catholic, joined the Krishna consciousness movement in her 20s, and more recently became a devotee of Nichiren Buddhism. All three disciplines are ritual-intensive, and so, in different ways, is the work in Ms. Azcárate’s first New York solo.

The circular shape, in essence an interfaith form, predominates. One example fills a wall: Its radiating and concentric lines are composed of metal bottle caps the artist has collected in her travels, each flattened and cut into spiky florets representing Hindu and Buddhist chakras or wheels. A few small pictures on paper have designs worked out from strings of alphabetical letters typed on an old typewriter.

A group of dozens of watercolor paintings on wood panels seems, with the works’ bright colors and busy patterns, designed far less to focus the eye or mind than to keep both on the move. And the grouping itself is kinetic. The different-size panels are ganged together upright and free-standing on a shelf, and visitors are invited to rearrange them as they please.

Piece by piece, there’s nothing formally new about Ms. Azcárate’s art, but the potential for hands-on interaction is appealing, as is the ritualistic ongoingness of her project. During the course of the show, new mandalas arrive at the gallery each week, painted and typed on postcards sent from her studio in Madrid, or from wherever she may be.

APPROACHES TO ABSTRACT PAINTING

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Garry Stephan New Work at SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY

Saturday, March 22, 2014