Jasper Johns: Regrets

by Christophe Cherix (Contributor), Jasper Johns (Artist), Ann Temkin (Contributor)

In June 2012, Jasper Johns encountered a photograph of the painter Lucian Freud reproduced in a Christie's auction catalogue. Inspired not only by the image, but by the physical qualities of the photograph itself, Johns took this motif through a succession of cross-medium permutations. He also incorporated into his art the text of a rubber stamp he had had made several years earlier to allow him to efficiently decline the myriad requests and invitations that come his "Regrets/Jasper Johns." But the stamp's text also calls to mind the more familiar connotations of regret, such as loss, disappointment and remorse, evoking an enigmatic sense of melancholy. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of this series of paintings, drawings and prints created over the last year and a half through an intricate combination of techniques, this publication presents each of the new works in full color. An essay by Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, examines the importance of process and experimentation, the cycle of dead ends and fresh starts, and the incessant interplay of materials, meaning, and representation so characteristic of Johns' career over the last 60 years.

Genres: Art

72 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2014

Reviews

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jasper Johns: Regrets is the catalog of MOMA's 2014 exhibition of Johns' exploration of John Deakins' 1964 photograph of Lucian Freud that had spent years on the studio floor of artist Francis Bacon before Christie's picked it up for auction, including it in a catalog that Johns paged through some fateful day in the early 2010's. All of that is so much inside baseball but I can't help myself, just coming off reading about the artistic process of a modern artist like Johns and catalog writers like Cherix and Temkin. Everyone involved - included me as a reader - takes real pleasure in referring to a reference that refers to a symbol that is really nothing but a reference to the initial referral.

And I appreciate Johns' accomplishment with Regrets so much more from reading the catalog. The crumpled up and torn photo captures Freud holding his forehead in one hand, slumped over on a modest twin bed snugged up against a plain white plaster wall. The photo is crumpled, a significant chunk torn from its lower left hand corner. Cherix and Temkin cover how Johns uses the folds and tears of the photograph as much as the content of the photo itself in building his study of Regrets. Like all good art critics they put the works in context of Johns' larger body of work, both in terms of content and technique.

I know next to nothing about art and especially technique, craft, materials: spit-bite aquatint? But Cherix and Temkins detailed discussion of how Johns accomplished the different pieces gave meaning to the works that I could not have brought on my own. And that is the joy of reading good exhibition catalogs.

Unfortunately, the authors undercut their own good work by ending their essay with the worn and meaningless statement about how all great works of art are really unknowable. I just finished watching Amazon's rendition of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens where the good angel defends God as being 'ineffable' - we can't question God's plans because they are ineffable. Well, David Tenant as the bad angel isn't having any of that ineffable clap-trap. Unknowable, pshaw: such declarations only serve to draw false lines: it's the whole missing referral thing: you have to know what is unknowable in order to truly know it. What?