Numbers.
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Title |
Numbers. |
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Creator |
Johns, Jasper (American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, born 1930) |
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Date |
1966 |
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Cultural Context |
American
North American |
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Style/Period |
Modern (styles and periods)
Neo-Dada
Pop (fine arts styles) |
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Subject |
Numerals |
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Description |
"Johns used letters or numbers as a means of reintroducing the signifiers of a collective sign system into a Modernist 'field' previously answerable to subjective judgments of taste. The textures in his drawings in particular are subtly modulated. In this example he has overlayed a metallic powder wash over a graphite wash to produce a hint of color." (Caption, p.58); "Johns's indeterminate position with respect to the imposition of aesthetic or social readings from the outside has been shown by the art historian Moira Roth to arise from an 'aesthetics of indifference' uniting Johns, [Robert] Rauschenberg, and John Cage. Unlike Abstract Expressionists such as [Barnett] Newman and [Robert] Motherwell, these artists' fascination with [Marcel] Duchamp's dandyism predisposed them to avoid overt political alignments. The sheer ambiguity cultivated by Johns in this respect is exemplified by a series of works from the late 1950s onward in which innocuous sequences of numbers were put through a series of painted and drawn variations. The sequences were stepped such that they read horizontally, diagonally, and often vertically. They thus replaced the arbitrary subjectivity embodied in the Abstract Expressionist painted surface with a self-evidently 'logical' means of getting from one side of the pictorial field to the other. With such a system in place, Johns paradoxically freed himself to work around the numbers, courting the picture surface as devotedly as [Willem] de Kooning. Roth emphasizes, however, that one could easily see the numbers as obliquely keyed to McCarthyism. Numerical sequences often acquired occult significance in the trials for spying, where 'codes were constantly on the verge of being cracked'. It becomes clear that the numbers resist being counted, so to speak, on either interpretative side. They work, as Fred Orton has said of Flag [1954-5], precisely 'in the space of difference', failing to confirm either one reading or another." (Excerpt, pp.60-61) |
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Material |
Metallic powder and graphite wash on polyester fabric
Cloth
Polyester
Graphite (mineral)
Powder
Wash (coating) |
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Technique |
Drawing (image-making) |
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Work Type |
Drawings |
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Repository |
National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) |
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Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.59, fig.29) |
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Rights |
Photograph reproduced in Hopkins courtesy: National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Leo Castelli in memory of Tony Castelli. Photo Dean Beasom. © Jasper Johns/VAGA, New York/DACS, London, 2000. (1981.82.1/DR) |
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Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
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Format |
image/jpeg |
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Digital File Name |
VRC 827-23.jpg |
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Rating |
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