Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965

by Jeffrey Weiss

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar art. His work from 1955 to 1965 was pivotal, exercising an enormous impact on the subsequent development of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art in the United States and Europe. This is the first publication to approach Johns’s work of this ten-year period through a thematic framework. It examines the artist's interest in the condition of painting as a medium, a practice, and an instrument of encoded meaning through several interrelated motifs: the target, the “device,” the naming of colors, and the imprint of the body.
In this handsome book, leading scholars, a conservator, and a contemporary artist consider Johns’s activity in this critical decade and discuss many of his iconic paintings, such as Target with Four Faces (1955), Diver (1962), Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963), and Arrive-Depart (1963). Their new critical and historical perspectives are grounded in an unusually close visual and material analysis of Johns's work.

Genres: Art

276 pages, Hardcover

First published January 10, 2007

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

This volume is rather scholarly and dense. If you are an art student or someone truly interested in Jasper Johns it might make sense to read it. The first section of the first essay consists of description of the paintings which are fully illustrated. The rest of the first essay places the paintings in the context of the materials the artist uses. The last part of the book consists of several shorter and more readable essays.