check out the slide show.
A Lens Catches; a Painter Converts
‘Jasper Johns: Regrets,’ a New Series at MoMA
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.
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