Jasper JOHNS (born in 1930)
Intro
Jasper Johns (born 1930) is one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era, known for bridging Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art through his iconic depictions of flags, targets, numbers, and maps.
Biography and Personal Background
Johns grew up in rural South Carolina after his parents' divorce when he was a toddler. He lived with various relatives, including grandparents and aunts, in a fragmented family environment with limited exposure to art beyond his grandmother's paintings. This unstable childhood fostered a sense of detachment and introspection, themes that recur in his work. He briefly attended the University of South Carolina before moving to New York in 1949, where he formed key relationships with Robert Rauschenberg (a romantic and artistic partner until 1961), John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. These connections emphasized chance, everyday objects, and questioning artistic conventions.
Johns has remained intensely private, rarely discussing his personal life in depth. In interviews, he described early efforts to "hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions" in his work, reflecting a deliberate reserve. Later pieces from the 1980s onward became more autobiographical, incorporating childhood memories, family artifacts, and personal symbols.
Art and Psychological Themes
Johns's signature motifs—flags and targets—are "things the mind already knows": pre-existing, familiar images that are "seen and not looked at, not examined." By rendering them in encaustic (wax-based paint) with textured, layered surfaces, he forces viewers to re-examine the ordinary, blurring boundaries between representation and object, art and reality.
Art historians and critics have offered informal psychological interpretations:
No formal clinical psychological evaluation of Johns exists publicly—he is a living artist who guards his privacy. Any "psychological evaluation" would be speculative art criticism rather than diagnostic. His work invites psychological engagement by challenging perception and meaning, aligning with semiotic and philosophical inquiries rather than personal confession.Johns's enduring influence lies in his intellectual rigor and emotional restraint, making his art a mirror for viewers' own interpretations.
Biography and Personal Background
Johns grew up in rural South Carolina after his parents' divorce when he was a toddler. He lived with various relatives, including grandparents and aunts, in a fragmented family environment with limited exposure to art beyond his grandmother's paintings. This unstable childhood fostered a sense of detachment and introspection, themes that recur in his work. He briefly attended the University of South Carolina before moving to New York in 1949, where he formed key relationships with Robert Rauschenberg (a romantic and artistic partner until 1961), John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. These connections emphasized chance, everyday objects, and questioning artistic conventions.
Johns has remained intensely private, rarely discussing his personal life in depth. In interviews, he described early efforts to "hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions" in his work, reflecting a deliberate reserve. Later pieces from the 1980s onward became more autobiographical, incorporating childhood memories, family artifacts, and personal symbols.
Art and Psychological Themes
Johns's signature motifs—flags and targets—are "things the mind already knows": pre-existing, familiar images that are "seen and not looked at, not examined." By rendering them in encaustic (wax-based paint) with textured, layered surfaces, he forces viewers to re-examine the ordinary, blurring boundaries between representation and object, art and reality.
Art historians and critics have offered informal psychological interpretations:
- Flags may evoke patriotism, identity, or ambiguity (is it a flag or a painting of one?), possibly tied to Johns's Southern roots and a childhood memory of his father showing him a statue of Revolutionary War hero Sergeant William Jasper (after whom both were named).
- Targets suggest vulnerability, aiming, or self-scrutiny, inviting projection from the viewer.
- His shift to more personal imagery in later works (e.g., references to family, loss, or queer identity in a repressive era) reflects a gradual unveiling of emotion.
No formal clinical psychological evaluation of Johns exists publicly—he is a living artist who guards his privacy. Any "psychological evaluation" would be speculative art criticism rather than diagnostic. His work invites psychological engagement by challenging perception and meaning, aligning with semiotic and philosophical inquiries rather than personal confession.Johns's enduring influence lies in his intellectual rigor and emotional restraint, making his art a mirror for viewers' own interpretations.
Jasper Johns' Influences represent a rich convergence of mid-20th-century avant-garde ideas, personal relationships, and philosophical inquiries that propelled him from Abstract Expressionism toward Neo-Dada, Proto-Pop, and Conceptual Art. Born in 1930 in Georgia, Johns returned to New York in 1953 after military service, destroying much of his early work and pivoting to iconic, everyday symbols (flags, targets, numbers, maps) that challenged the dominant emotional abstraction of the time.
Primary Influences
Johns' use of familiar icons and detachment laid groundwork for Pop Art. Artists like Andy Warhol (who admired Johns' everyday subjects and mechanical feel), Roy Lichtenstein, and others drew from his recontextualization of culture, shifting toward mass-media imagery while retaining conceptual depth.Johns' art remains enigmatic—symbols that seem straightforward yet resist interpretation—rooted in these influences' blend of chance, readymade critique, collaboration, and philosophical doubt. Major retrospectives (e.g., Whitney/Philadelphia 2021 "Mind/Mirror") highlight this legacy as a bridge between abstraction's end and postwar innovation's start.
Primary Influences
- Robert Rauschenberg — The most direct and personal influence. Meeting in the early 1950s, Johns and Rauschenberg became romantic partners and collaborators until 1961, sharing studios and ideas in New York's vibrant scene. Rauschenberg's "Combines" (blending painting, sculpture, and found objects) inspired Johns to incorporate everyday, recognizable imagery rather than pure abstraction. Their mutual rejection of Abstract Expressionism's introspection led Johns to treat cultural symbols (e.g., the American flag) as both literal and loaded, bridging high art and vernacular life. Rauschenberg introduced Johns to key figures and concepts, amplifying their shared Neo-Dada leanings.
- Marcel Duchamp — Profound conceptual impact via Dada and the readymade. Johns encountered Duchamp's work in the late 1950s (notably at the Philadelphia Museum collection) and met him personally around 1959–1960. Duchamp's idea of ordinary objects as art (questioning aesthetics, authorship, and perception) deeply resonated. Johns adopted everyday symbols not for their visual appeal but as intellectual provocations—prompting viewers to question meaning, familiarity, and art's boundaries. Works like According to What (1964) homage Duchamp (echoing Tu m'), and Johns credited him with introducing "doubt into the air that surrounds art." This intellectual shift influenced Johns' rejection of fixed meanings.
- John Cage — Through Rauschenberg (and Merce Cunningham), Johns absorbed Cage's theories of chance, indeterminacy, and Zen-inspired non-intention. Cage's music incorporated randomness (e.g., I Ching-derived compositions), encouraging Johns to introduce unpredictability into his precise process—relinquishing some control for spontaneity and depth. This tempered Johns' meticulous encaustic technique with elements of accident, adding philosophical layers to his work.
- Abstract Expressionism (e.g., Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Jack Tworkov) — Johns initially engaged with gestural mark-making and encaustic for texture, but he subverted its emotional subjectivity by applying it to impersonal symbols. He admired the physicality but rejected the introspective drama.
- Dada and Neo-Dada — Beyond Duchamp, the movement's irreverence and anti-art stance informed Johns' challenge to conventions.
- Other sources — Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and signification (1960s onward) deepened Johns' exploration of semiotics. Earlier art history (Picasso, Cézanne) appeared in appropriations, and he referenced figures like Barnett Newman or George Ohr in later works.
Johns' use of familiar icons and detachment laid groundwork for Pop Art. Artists like Andy Warhol (who admired Johns' everyday subjects and mechanical feel), Roy Lichtenstein, and others drew from his recontextualization of culture, shifting toward mass-media imagery while retaining conceptual depth.Johns' art remains enigmatic—symbols that seem straightforward yet resist interpretation—rooted in these influences' blend of chance, readymade critique, collaboration, and philosophical doubt. Major retrospectives (e.g., Whitney/Philadelphia 2021 "Mind/Mirror") highlight this legacy as a bridge between abstraction's end and postwar innovation's start.
masterpiece
1954-1955 Flag
MoMA
Artistic creation has no limits in New York in 1954. Very young artists endeavor to reject into the past the Abstract Expressionism that was yet barely ten years old.
After meeting Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, aged 24, had one of the most effective intuitions of modern art. Duchamp had introduced the ready mades in artistic creation. In an extension from Malevich, not only the canvas is an object but also the paint and the theme are objects.
The three saturated colors of the American flag are to Johns an incentive for new art. His flags identical to the official pieces will be painted on all kinds of materials including newspapers and actual flags.
Like Cézanne, he works within the contours as in a cloisonné. Unlike Pollock and Rothko, the first meticulous gesture must be the right one. Any dripping is therefore intentional, which requires a fast drying : Johns painted in wax.
In his artistic vision, that theme of the US flag enables to offer to the public a familiar theme without falling into a hermetic abstraction.
Leo Castelli understands how much the art can be changed by this innovation. Favoring the material instead of shape and color, Johns comes in the follow of Burri. He anticipates Manzoni's achromes and Ryder's white on white while his treatment of a recognizable object is announcing the pop art by Warhol and Lichtenstein.
Analyze Johns's Flag painting
Jasper Johns – Flag (1954–1955)
Encaustic, oil, and collage on plywood, 42¼ × 60⅝ in (107.3 × 154 cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.)
This is the painting that changed everything.
1. The Origin Story
Johns famously said he dreamed of painting an American flag and then woke up and did it. Executed in 1954–55 (with several versions made over the next few years), this first Flag is the one that stunned Leo Castelli when he visited Johns’s studio in 1958 and immediately offered him a solo show. Alfred Barr bought three paintings from that debut exhibition for MoMA on the spot — including this Flag.
2. Technique and Physical Presence
A. It is both a flag and a painting of a flag
The central question Johns forces:
When is a flag no longer a flag and just a painting?
When is a painting no longer just a painting but a flag?
The work collapses the distinction between object and representation.
B. “Things the mind already knows”
Like targets, maps, and numbers, the flag is an image everyone recognizes instantly. By choosing something pre-known, Johns removes the need for invention and instead focuses on perception itself. There is no “subject matter” to interpret — only the act of looking.
C. Deadpan neutrality vs. emotional charge
The flag is one of the most emotionally loaded symbols in American life (patriotism, war, protest, death). Yet Johns paints it with cool detachment — no heroic gestures, no commentary. The neutrality becomes the commentary: the painting refuses to tell you how to feel about the flag.D. Critique of Abstract Expressionism
In 1954, AbEx (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko) was still the dominant mode: large scale, personal gesture, spiritual ambition. Johns uses the same scale and all-over energy, but replaces existential anguish with a readymade image. The brushstrokes are visible, sensual, and lush — yet they serve no expressive purpose. It is heroic painting with the heroism deliberately drained out.4. Historical Impact
Johns returned obsessively to the flag motif for decades:
6. One Sentence Summary
With Flag, Jasper Johns took the most familiar, over-determined image in American visual culture, painted it with exquisite sensuality and absolute emotional restraint, and in doing so invented the strategy that would dominate advanced art for the next half-century: the use of the readymade image to question the very nature of painting, meaning, and perception.
After meeting Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, aged 24, had one of the most effective intuitions of modern art. Duchamp had introduced the ready mades in artistic creation. In an extension from Malevich, not only the canvas is an object but also the paint and the theme are objects.
The three saturated colors of the American flag are to Johns an incentive for new art. His flags identical to the official pieces will be painted on all kinds of materials including newspapers and actual flags.
Like Cézanne, he works within the contours as in a cloisonné. Unlike Pollock and Rothko, the first meticulous gesture must be the right one. Any dripping is therefore intentional, which requires a fast drying : Johns painted in wax.
In his artistic vision, that theme of the US flag enables to offer to the public a familiar theme without falling into a hermetic abstraction.
Leo Castelli understands how much the art can be changed by this innovation. Favoring the material instead of shape and color, Johns comes in the follow of Burri. He anticipates Manzoni's achromes and Ryder's white on white while his treatment of a recognizable object is announcing the pop art by Warhol and Lichtenstein.
Analyze Johns's Flag painting
Jasper Johns – Flag (1954–1955)
Encaustic, oil, and collage on plywood, 42¼ × 60⅝ in (107.3 × 154 cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.)
This is the painting that changed everything.
1. The Origin Story
Johns famously said he dreamed of painting an American flag and then woke up and did it. Executed in 1954–55 (with several versions made over the next few years), this first Flag is the one that stunned Leo Castelli when he visited Johns’s studio in 1958 and immediately offered him a solo show. Alfred Barr bought three paintings from that debut exhibition for MoMA on the spot — including this Flag.
2. Technique and Physical Presence
- Medium: Encaustic (pigmented hot wax) mixed with oil paint, applied over strips of newspaper and fabric collage.
- Surface: Thick, buttery, heavily worked — you can see fingerprints, drips, and the weave of the cloth through the wax.
- The encaustic gives the flag a strange, ancient, almost archaeological feel — as if it were an artifact dug up rather than a freshly painted image.
- The 48-star flag (pre-Alaska and Hawaii) is rendered at almost exactly to official proportions, but slightly imperfect by hand.
A. It is both a flag and a painting of a flag
The central question Johns forces:
When is a flag no longer a flag and just a painting?
When is a painting no longer just a painting but a flag?
The work collapses the distinction between object and representation.
B. “Things the mind already knows”
Like targets, maps, and numbers, the flag is an image everyone recognizes instantly. By choosing something pre-known, Johns removes the need for invention and instead focuses on perception itself. There is no “subject matter” to interpret — only the act of looking.
C. Deadpan neutrality vs. emotional charge
The flag is one of the most emotionally loaded symbols in American life (patriotism, war, protest, death). Yet Johns paints it with cool detachment — no heroic gestures, no commentary. The neutrality becomes the commentary: the painting refuses to tell you how to feel about the flag.D. Critique of Abstract Expressionism
In 1954, AbEx (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko) was still the dominant mode: large scale, personal gesture, spiritual ambition. Johns uses the same scale and all-over energy, but replaces existential anguish with a readymade image. The brushstrokes are visible, sensual, and lush — yet they serve no expressive purpose. It is heroic painting with the heroism deliberately drained out.4. Historical Impact
- Ended the reign of Abstract Expressionism almost single-handedly (along with Rauschenberg’s combines).
- Opened the door to Pop Art (Warhol’s flags and disasters owe a direct debt), Minimalism, and Conceptual Art.
- Made it acceptable — even radical — for an artist to use pre-existing imagery without irony, appropriation, and the questioning of authorship all begin here.
Johns returned obsessively to the flag motif for decades:
- Three Flags (1958) — stacked in diminishing size, creating a 3D effect
- White Flag (1955), Flag (Moratorium) (1969), burned and gunshot flags in the 1980s
- Even in the 2010s, flag fragments appear in the Regrets series
6. One Sentence Summary
With Flag, Jasper Johns took the most familiar, over-determined image in American visual culture, painted it with exquisite sensuality and absolute emotional restraint, and in doing so invented the strategy that would dominate advanced art for the next half-century: the use of the readymade image to question the very nature of painting, meaning, and perception.
Did Johns himself comment how ambiguous his Flags are for a patriotic interpretation ? Has he ever been a US patriot ?
Jasper Johns has consistently emphasized the ambiguity inherent in his Flag paintings, deliberately choosing the American flag as a subject precisely because it is a familiar symbol that people recognize instantly but often fail to truly examine or question.
He famously described his motifs (flags, targets, numbers, maps) as "things the mind already knows"—objects that are "seen and not looked at, not examined." By rendering the flag in a painterly, textured way (often with encaustic and collage elements like newspaper scraps), he forces viewers to confront the duality: Is it a flag (an object evoking patriotism, national identity, or political symbolism) or merely a painting of one? This creates an intentional oscillation between representation and reality, inviting multiple interpretations without resolving them.
Johns has explicitly distanced his work from straightforward patriotic intent. In a 2004 interview, he stated: "But I wasn't trying to make a patriotic statement", noting that mass reproductions of Flag have often reduced it to a simplistic expression of patriotism, losing the subtleties he intended (such as embedded newspaper fragments symbolizing conflicting national narratives). Critics and curators have echoed this, describing the flags as neutral, ironic, or even questioning jingoism, with the enduring appeal lying in the undecidability—patriotic for some, critical or oppressive for others.
As for whether Johns has ever expressed himself as a US patriot, there is no evidence of him identifying as one in conventional terms. He remains notoriously private and enigmatic about personal politics, avoiding overt statements. He served in the US Army during the Korean War era but has not framed his flag works as celebrations of nationalism. In the same 2004 interview, he showed limited political engagement (e.g., auctioning a work for Democrats in one election cycle but rebuffing broader discussions of American government). His art prioritizes perceptual and semiotic ambiguity over declarative patriotism, allowing viewers to project their own meanings—whether affirmative, skeptical, or something in between.
Jasper Johns has consistently emphasized the ambiguity inherent in his Flag paintings, deliberately choosing the American flag as a subject precisely because it is a familiar symbol that people recognize instantly but often fail to truly examine or question.
He famously described his motifs (flags, targets, numbers, maps) as "things the mind already knows"—objects that are "seen and not looked at, not examined." By rendering the flag in a painterly, textured way (often with encaustic and collage elements like newspaper scraps), he forces viewers to confront the duality: Is it a flag (an object evoking patriotism, national identity, or political symbolism) or merely a painting of one? This creates an intentional oscillation between representation and reality, inviting multiple interpretations without resolving them.
Johns has explicitly distanced his work from straightforward patriotic intent. In a 2004 interview, he stated: "But I wasn't trying to make a patriotic statement", noting that mass reproductions of Flag have often reduced it to a simplistic expression of patriotism, losing the subtleties he intended (such as embedded newspaper fragments symbolizing conflicting national narratives). Critics and curators have echoed this, describing the flags as neutral, ironic, or even questioning jingoism, with the enduring appeal lying in the undecidability—patriotic for some, critical or oppressive for others.
As for whether Johns has ever expressed himself as a US patriot, there is no evidence of him identifying as one in conventional terms. He remains notoriously private and enigmatic about personal politics, avoiding overt statements. He served in the US Army during the Korean War era but has not framed his flag works as celebrations of nationalism. In the same 2004 interview, he showed limited political engagement (e.g., auctioning a work for Democrats in one election cycle but rebuffing broader discussions of American government). His art prioritizes perceptual and semiotic ambiguity over declarative patriotism, allowing viewers to project their own meanings—whether affirmative, skeptical, or something in between.
Compare Johns's message about the meaning of art with the groundbreaking Magrotte's La Trahison des Images ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe.")
René Magritte's La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images, 1929)
Magritte's groundbreaking painting depicts a realistic image of a tobacco pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). The message is direct and philosophical: the painting is not the pipe itself but merely a representation or image of one. As Magritte explained, you cannot stuff tobacco into it or smoke it—it's an illusion, a sign standing in for the real object. This challenges the viewer's assumptions about representation, language, and reality, highlighting the "treachery" (deception) of images that pretend to be the things they depict. Influenced by surrealism and semiotics, it underscores the arbitrary link between words, images, and the world, asserting that art is fundamentally about signs, not direct equivalence.
Jasper Johns's Message in Works like Flag (1954–55) and Targets
Johns chose "things the mind already knows"—pre-existing, familiar symbols like the American flag or targets—to force viewers to truly examine what they usually just "see" without questioning. His Flag is painted in encaustic with collage (newspaper scraps visible beneath layers), emphasizing its materiality as a painting: textured brushstrokes, physical paint, and objecthood. Johns stated that his flag painting is "no more about a flag than about a brushstroke, or about the physicality of paint." The core question is ambiguous: Is this a flag (a real object/symbol) or a painting of one? By making the representation identical in design to the actual flag, Johns blurs the boundary, creating an oscillation between the thing and its depiction, inviting perceptual and interpretive uncertainty.
Comparison of Their Messages About the Meaning of Art
Both artists profoundly question the nature of representation in art, exposing how images mediate (and distort) our grasp of reality:
No, René Magritte never publicly commented on Jasper Johns's Flag paintings (or any of Johns's work).
Magritte died in 1967, and while he and Johns met briefly in person in 1965 during Magritte's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, there is no record of Magritte discussing, critiquing, or referencing Johns's art in interviews, letters, writings, or elsewhere.
The influence flows in the opposite direction: Johns (along with Robert Rauschenberg) saw Magritte's word-image paintings, including La Trahison des Images ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe"), in a 1954 New York gallery exhibition, which profoundly impacted his development of motifs like flags and targets that blur the line between object and representation.
Art historians and critics frequently compare the two—Magritte's explicit denial of equivalence versus Johns's material ambiguity—but Magritte himself did not engage with Johns's work. He was known to criticize Pop Art more broadly (for representing "the world as it is"), yet no specific remarks about Johns survive.
René Magritte's La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images, 1929)
Magritte's groundbreaking painting depicts a realistic image of a tobacco pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). The message is direct and philosophical: the painting is not the pipe itself but merely a representation or image of one. As Magritte explained, you cannot stuff tobacco into it or smoke it—it's an illusion, a sign standing in for the real object. This challenges the viewer's assumptions about representation, language, and reality, highlighting the "treachery" (deception) of images that pretend to be the things they depict. Influenced by surrealism and semiotics, it underscores the arbitrary link between words, images, and the world, asserting that art is fundamentally about signs, not direct equivalence.
Jasper Johns's Message in Works like Flag (1954–55) and Targets
Johns chose "things the mind already knows"—pre-existing, familiar symbols like the American flag or targets—to force viewers to truly examine what they usually just "see" without questioning. His Flag is painted in encaustic with collage (newspaper scraps visible beneath layers), emphasizing its materiality as a painting: textured brushstrokes, physical paint, and objecthood. Johns stated that his flag painting is "no more about a flag than about a brushstroke, or about the physicality of paint." The core question is ambiguous: Is this a flag (a real object/symbol) or a painting of one? By making the representation identical in design to the actual flag, Johns blurs the boundary, creating an oscillation between the thing and its depiction, inviting perceptual and interpretive uncertainty.
Comparison of Their Messages About the Meaning of Art
Both artists profoundly question the nature of representation in art, exposing how images mediate (and distort) our grasp of reality:
- Similarities:
- Both disrupt naive realism: Magritte explicitly denies equivalence ("this is not a pipe"), while Johns implicitly provokes it (is this a flag or not?). Art historians frequently link them—Johns encountered Magritte's work in 1954 and was deeply impressed; critics describe Johns's flags as updating Magritte's paradox to ask, "Is this a flag or an image?"
- They highlight the gap between sign and referent: Magritte through text-image contradiction; Johns through material execution and familiar motifs that resist fixed meaning.
- Their work shifts focus from content to perception: Art isn't about conveying a clear "message" but about making viewers aware of how meaning is constructed (or deconstructed).
- Differences:
- Magritte's approach is didactic and linguistic: He uses words to negate the image, creating a paradox rooted in semiotics and philosophy (influencing thinkers like Michel Foucault).
- Johns's is perceptual and material: No text; the ambiguity arises from the painting's physical presence and the viewer's confrontation with a "known" object rendered as art. It emphasizes objecthood (influenced by Duchamp) and invites endless interpretation without resolution.
- Magritte denies; Johns equivocates—his flags/targets can function as both object and representation simultaneously.
No, René Magritte never publicly commented on Jasper Johns's Flag paintings (or any of Johns's work).
Magritte died in 1967, and while he and Johns met briefly in person in 1965 during Magritte's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, there is no record of Magritte discussing, critiquing, or referencing Johns's art in interviews, letters, writings, or elsewhere.
The influence flows in the opposite direction: Johns (along with Robert Rauschenberg) saw Magritte's word-image paintings, including La Trahison des Images ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe"), in a 1954 New York gallery exhibition, which profoundly impacted his development of motifs like flags and targets that blur the line between object and representation.
Art historians and critics frequently compare the two—Magritte's explicit denial of equivalence versus Johns's material ambiguity—but Magritte himself did not engage with Johns's work. He was known to criticize Pop Art more broadly (for representing "the world as it is"), yet no specific remarks about Johns survive.
Special Report
Encaustic Application
Encaustic is an ancient painting technique (dating back over 2,000 years, used in Greek and Roman funerary portraits like the Fayum mummy portraits) that Johns revived and made central to his practice in the 1950s. It involves mixing pigments with hot molten beeswax (sometimes with additives like damar resin for hardness and luster), applying the molten mixture to a surface, and then fusing (reheating) layers with heat sources like a blowtorch, heat gun, or palette knife.
Why Johns Chose Encaustic
Johns switched to encaustic after dissatisfaction with oil or house paint. Key advantages that aligned with his goals in the gray targets and similar works (e.g., Flag, targets from 1955–1961):
Encaustic demands skill and safety precautions (hot wax, ventilation), but its revival by Johns brought it into modern art discourse, inspiring contemporary artists for its textural and archival qualities. In his gray monochromes, it perfectly serves the theme of restraint revealing richness.
Why Johns Chose Encaustic
Johns switched to encaustic after dissatisfaction with oil or house paint. Key advantages that aligned with his goals in the gray targets and similar works (e.g., Flag, targets from 1955–1961):
- Quick drying: The wax cools and solidifies almost immediately, preserving every brushstroke, drip, drag, and gesture without blending or smearing. This captured the "tactile" and "sculptural" quality of the mark-making, making process visible.
- Layering and translucency: Multiple thin or thick layers can be built up; underlayers (including embedded newspaper collage) show through subtly, creating depth, history, and a palimpsest effect. In gray works, this produces nuanced tonal shifts and light absorption/reflection.
- Texture and materiality: The surface becomes highly physical—raised, waxy, almost relief-like—with visible impasto, bubbles, drips, and tool marks. This emphasizes the painting as an object rather than an illusionistic window, aligning with Johns's interest in perception and "thing-ness."
- Durability and luminosity: The wax acts as a protective medium, yielding a matte-to-satin finish that catches light beautifully, especially in monochrome grays where subtle variations shine.
Encaustic demands skill and safety precautions (hot wax, ventilation), but its revival by Johns brought it into modern art discourse, inspiring contemporary artists for its textural and archival qualities. In his gray monochromes, it perfectly serves the theme of restraint revealing richness.
Special Report
Figures
Jasper Johns' early "Figures" (or single-number paintings) from 1955 represent a pivotal extension of the breakthrough he achieved with Flag (1954–55, MoMA), applying similar techniques and conceptual approaches to numerals as familiar, pre-existing signs.
These works, often called the "Figures" series (single digits like Figure 0 through Figure 9 or similar), were executed soon after Flag. They mark Johns' shift toward using everyday, emblematic subjects—"things the mind already knows"—to explore perception, materiality, and the boundary between representation and abstraction.
Breakthrough and Context
Johns' Flag (1954–55) was a radical departure from Abstract Expressionism's gestural subjectivity. He recalled dreaming of painting an American flag, then realizing it the next day. This allowed him to bypass inventing subject matter and focus on process, materials, and how viewers perceive known images.
The Figures followed immediately in 1955 as part of his exploration of stenciled or hand-rendered numerals (and targets). These small-scale works treated numbers as neutral, cultural icons akin to the flag—ubiquitous, standardized signs stripped of personal expression. They helped establish Johns' signature style, bridging late Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, and paving the way for Pop Art's seriality and appropriation.
Detailed Technique (Focus on Figure 2, 1955)
Figure 2 (Christie's lot estimated $ 10M, from the S.I. Newhouse collection, May 18, 2026, lot 12A) is a small encaustic, canvas, and printed paper collage on canvas (17 ¼ x 14 in.), signed/dated/titled on the reverse. It realized $ 8.9M.
Inspiration and Intention
Johns drew from dreams, Duchamp's readymades, and a desire to neutralize subjectivity. Numbers, like flags, are standardized and pre-known, freeing the artist to investigate how something is painted (process, surface, perception) rather than what. He sought ambiguity: Is it a painting of a number, or a numerical object? Intentions included questioning representation, memory, and the viewer's expectations. The works feel both impersonal (stenciled forms) and highly crafted.
Reception and Legacy
Early reception was shocking in the Abstract Expressionist-dominated 1950s; Johns' 1958 Castelli show (including related works) was a sensation, with MoMA acquiring pieces. Critics and peers saw it as a cool, ironic counter to gestural heroism.Legacy: Foundational to Pop Art, Minimalism, and conceptual practices. Johns influenced artists exploring appropriation, seriality, and materiality (e.g., Warhol, later appropriation artists). His numbers series expanded into 0 Through 9 (superimposed layers, 1960–61), prints, and variations, showing sustained engagement. The Figures underscore his career-long themes of repetition, variation, and hidden meanings beneath familiar surfaces.
Comparison with the Original Flag (MoMA)
Jasper Johns' early single-number "Figures" from 1955 form a small, cohesive group of intimate encaustic and collage paintings (typically small-scale, around 17–20 inches), executed right after Flag. They share the same core technique and conceptual framework but vary subtly in numeral form, surface handling, and visual impact due to the inherent shapes of each digit.
Shared Characteristics
All are encaustic (pigment in hot wax) over printed paper/newspaper collage on canvas. This produces a thick, luminous, waxy surface with visible texture, drips, and underlying fragments for depth and temporality. The numerals are rendered flatly (often via stencil influence) yet painterly, emphasizing materiality over illusion. They treat numbers as neutral signs, akin to the flag—familiar, non-subjective motifs allowing focus on process and perception.
Figure 2 (1955, Christie's/Newhouse Collection)
Small (17 ¼ x 14 in.), creamy/white encaustic with collage. The curved, flowing form of "2" creates a dynamic, somewhat organic presence against the textured ground. Its S-like curve and base give it a balanced, almost calligraphic quality. The white-on-white or near-monochromatic palette heightens subtlety, with wax layers revealing collage fragments.
Comparison to Figure 1
Figure 1 (1955, e.g., examples in collections like Museum Ludwig references) features a strong vertical stroke with a base, making it more stable and upright. It often appears more rectilinear and grounded compared to the curving "2." Both share the encaustic-collage build-up and small format, but "1" can feel simpler or more emphatic as a basic stroke, potentially with bolder vertical emphasis in the wax application. "2" introduces more fluidity and visual movement.
Comparison to Figure 5
Figure 5 (1955, Centre Pompidou, larger at ~183 x 137.5 cm / ~72 x 54 in.—notable outlier in scale) has a more complex, angular form with a strong horizontal top, vertical, and curved bottom. This creates greater internal contrast and visual weight than the smoother "2." Its larger size amplifies the textured encaustic presence, making the surface and collage more dominant. "5" feels more dynamic or "busy" in shape, while Figure 2 is compact and contained. Both explore the numeral as object, but "5" allows broader exploration of spatial occupation.
Comparison to Figure 7
Figure 7 (1955, LACMA: encaustic and collage) has a strong vertical with a crossbar and angled top, giving it a more architectural or stepped structure. This contrasts with "2"'s continuous curve, resulting in a more angular, interrupted silhouette. Surface texture is similarly rich, but the "7"'s form may emphasize linearity and edges in the wax. Like the others, it maintains the white/near-monochromatic restraint and collage depth, but "7" can appear more rigid or directional.
Overall Differences: Variations stem primarily from each digit's geometry—"1" (simplest/vertical), "2" (curved/organic), "5" (complex/angular, sometimes larger), "7" (stepped/linear). These affect rhythm, balance, and how the eye navigates the textured surface. Figure 2 stands out for its fluidity within the group's restraint. All advanced Johns' post-Flag breakthrough: serial exploration of signs, material innovation, and perceptual ambiguity, forming the foundation for his later 0–9 superimposed and color numeral series.
These works are rarely shown together but exemplify the intimate, experimental intensity of Johns' 1955 output.
These works, often called the "Figures" series (single digits like Figure 0 through Figure 9 or similar), were executed soon after Flag. They mark Johns' shift toward using everyday, emblematic subjects—"things the mind already knows"—to explore perception, materiality, and the boundary between representation and abstraction.
Breakthrough and Context
Johns' Flag (1954–55) was a radical departure from Abstract Expressionism's gestural subjectivity. He recalled dreaming of painting an American flag, then realizing it the next day. This allowed him to bypass inventing subject matter and focus on process, materials, and how viewers perceive known images.
The Figures followed immediately in 1955 as part of his exploration of stenciled or hand-rendered numerals (and targets). These small-scale works treated numbers as neutral, cultural icons akin to the flag—ubiquitous, standardized signs stripped of personal expression. They helped establish Johns' signature style, bridging late Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, and paving the way for Pop Art's seriality and appropriation.
Detailed Technique (Focus on Figure 2, 1955)
Figure 2 (Christie's lot estimated $ 10M, from the S.I. Newhouse collection, May 18, 2026, lot 12A) is a small encaustic, canvas, and printed paper collage on canvas (17 ¼ x 14 in.), signed/dated/titled on the reverse. It realized $ 8.9M.
- Encaustic: Pigment mixed with hot wax, applied in layers. This creates a thick, translucent, textured surface with a luminous, waxy quality that allows underlying elements to show through subtly. It was labor-intensive and slow-drying, emphasizing materiality over fluidity.
- Collage: Printed paper (newspaper or similar) fragments embedded beneath or within the wax layers, adding physical depth, historical specificity (e.g., dates or text fragments), and a sense of built-up history, much like Flag.
- Stencil/Hand-rendered numeral: The "2" is depicted flatly but with painterly variations in edge and texture, making the familiar sign tactile and painterly rather than purely graphic.
Inspiration and Intention
Johns drew from dreams, Duchamp's readymades, and a desire to neutralize subjectivity. Numbers, like flags, are standardized and pre-known, freeing the artist to investigate how something is painted (process, surface, perception) rather than what. He sought ambiguity: Is it a painting of a number, or a numerical object? Intentions included questioning representation, memory, and the viewer's expectations. The works feel both impersonal (stenciled forms) and highly crafted.
Reception and Legacy
Early reception was shocking in the Abstract Expressionist-dominated 1950s; Johns' 1958 Castelli show (including related works) was a sensation, with MoMA acquiring pieces. Critics and peers saw it as a cool, ironic counter to gestural heroism.Legacy: Foundational to Pop Art, Minimalism, and conceptual practices. Johns influenced artists exploring appropriation, seriality, and materiality (e.g., Warhol, later appropriation artists). His numbers series expanded into 0 Through 9 (superimposed layers, 1960–61), prints, and variations, showing sustained engagement. The Figures underscore his career-long themes of repetition, variation, and hidden meanings beneath familiar surfaces.
Comparison with the Original Flag (MoMA)
- Similarities: Both use encaustic over collage on a support (fabric/plywood for Flag), creating a dense, textured, object-like surface. Both appropriate a common emblem (flag/numerals) to focus on painting as process and perception. Newspaper collage anchors them in time and adds semi-hidden layers. Scale differs (Flag is large and iconic; Figure 2 intimate), but both feel "constructed" rather than illusionistic.
- Differences: Flag is explicitly national/symbolic and larger (42 ¼ x 60 ⅝ in.), with potential political readings in the McCarthy/Cold War era (though Johns downplayed overt politics). Figure 2 is more neutral/abstract—a single digit on a small canvas—emphasizing serial potential (numbers as a set). Flag has stars/stripes structure; the number is simpler but allows for stenciling variations. Both challenge "what is a painting?" but Figures lean more toward Minimalist seriality.
Jasper Johns' early single-number "Figures" from 1955 form a small, cohesive group of intimate encaustic and collage paintings (typically small-scale, around 17–20 inches), executed right after Flag. They share the same core technique and conceptual framework but vary subtly in numeral form, surface handling, and visual impact due to the inherent shapes of each digit.
Shared Characteristics
All are encaustic (pigment in hot wax) over printed paper/newspaper collage on canvas. This produces a thick, luminous, waxy surface with visible texture, drips, and underlying fragments for depth and temporality. The numerals are rendered flatly (often via stencil influence) yet painterly, emphasizing materiality over illusion. They treat numbers as neutral signs, akin to the flag—familiar, non-subjective motifs allowing focus on process and perception.
Figure 2 (1955, Christie's/Newhouse Collection)
Small (17 ¼ x 14 in.), creamy/white encaustic with collage. The curved, flowing form of "2" creates a dynamic, somewhat organic presence against the textured ground. Its S-like curve and base give it a balanced, almost calligraphic quality. The white-on-white or near-monochromatic palette heightens subtlety, with wax layers revealing collage fragments.
Comparison to Figure 1
Figure 1 (1955, e.g., examples in collections like Museum Ludwig references) features a strong vertical stroke with a base, making it more stable and upright. It often appears more rectilinear and grounded compared to the curving "2." Both share the encaustic-collage build-up and small format, but "1" can feel simpler or more emphatic as a basic stroke, potentially with bolder vertical emphasis in the wax application. "2" introduces more fluidity and visual movement.
Comparison to Figure 5
Figure 5 (1955, Centre Pompidou, larger at ~183 x 137.5 cm / ~72 x 54 in.—notable outlier in scale) has a more complex, angular form with a strong horizontal top, vertical, and curved bottom. This creates greater internal contrast and visual weight than the smoother "2." Its larger size amplifies the textured encaustic presence, making the surface and collage more dominant. "5" feels more dynamic or "busy" in shape, while Figure 2 is compact and contained. Both explore the numeral as object, but "5" allows broader exploration of spatial occupation.
Comparison to Figure 7
Figure 7 (1955, LACMA: encaustic and collage) has a strong vertical with a crossbar and angled top, giving it a more architectural or stepped structure. This contrasts with "2"'s continuous curve, resulting in a more angular, interrupted silhouette. Surface texture is similarly rich, but the "7"'s form may emphasize linearity and edges in the wax. Like the others, it maintains the white/near-monochromatic restraint and collage depth, but "7" can appear more rigid or directional.
Overall Differences: Variations stem primarily from each digit's geometry—"1" (simplest/vertical), "2" (curved/organic), "5" (complex/angular, sometimes larger), "7" (stepped/linear). These affect rhythm, balance, and how the eye navigates the textured surface. Figure 2 stands out for its fluidity within the group's restraint. All advanced Johns' post-Flag breakthrough: serial exploration of signs, material innovation, and perceptual ambiguity, forming the foundation for his later 0–9 superimposed and color numeral series.
These works are rarely shown together but exemplify the intimate, experimental intensity of Johns' 1955 output.
1957 Gray Rectangles
2018 SOLD for $ 21M by Christie's
The world is changing and art will have to change as well. The work of art does not need to be figurative, nor to tell a story, nor to confront colors, and must not be a mere decoration. Young artists rediscover their prophets : the ready made by Duchamp, the assassination of the painting by Miro, the black square on white by Malevich, the path to the monochrome by Barnett Newman.
In 1957, more or less independently of one another, new teams destroy the differentiation between painting and sculpture, replace canvas and paper by ordinary materials, integrate objects into their works, attempt an abstract interpretation of poetry. These creators are named Burri, Fontana, Klein, Rauschenberg, Johns, Twombly, Cornell.
Jasper Johns conceals signs under a gray encaustic. Pigments bring a variety of texture into this neutral monochrome. Gray Numbers, 71 x 59 cm, was sold for $ 8.7M by Sotheby's on November 11, 2009.
Gray Rectangles, 152 x 152 cm made in 1957, was sold for $ 21M by Christie's on November 13, 2018, lot 19 B estimated $ 18M. Three aligned rectangles had been painted in the bottom of the image respectively in red, yellow and blue. Hidden under the wax, these three colors have left a lingering trace, turning this gray monochrome into a mysterious picture.
This large-scale artwork appears as seminal of this new art and its provenance is prestigious. It was bought in 1964 by Ganz to Castelli and in 1988 by Ebsworth in the auction at Sotheby's of the Ganz collection.
In 1957, more or less independently of one another, new teams destroy the differentiation between painting and sculpture, replace canvas and paper by ordinary materials, integrate objects into their works, attempt an abstract interpretation of poetry. These creators are named Burri, Fontana, Klein, Rauschenberg, Johns, Twombly, Cornell.
Jasper Johns conceals signs under a gray encaustic. Pigments bring a variety of texture into this neutral monochrome. Gray Numbers, 71 x 59 cm, was sold for $ 8.7M by Sotheby's on November 11, 2009.
Gray Rectangles, 152 x 152 cm made in 1957, was sold for $ 21M by Christie's on November 13, 2018, lot 19 B estimated $ 18M. Three aligned rectangles had been painted in the bottom of the image respectively in red, yellow and blue. Hidden under the wax, these three colors have left a lingering trace, turning this gray monochrome into a mysterious picture.
This large-scale artwork appears as seminal of this new art and its provenance is prestigious. It was bought in 1964 by Ganz to Castelli and in 1988 by Ebsworth in the auction at Sotheby's of the Ganz collection.
1958 Gray Target
2026 SOLD for $ 29M by Christie's
Gray Target, encaustic on canvas 107 x 107 cm painted in 1958 by Jasper Johns, was sold for $ 29M from a lower estimate of $ 20M by Christie's on May 18, 2026, lot 13A in the sale of the Newhouse collection.
Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is a pivotal American artist whose mid-1950s shift from Abstract Expressionism to everyday symbols like flags, numbers, maps, and targets helped bridge to Pop Art while influencing Minimalism and Conceptual Art. His gray monochrome works, particularly the targets from the late 1950s, exemplify his interest in perception, materiality, and ambiguity.
Intention and Inspiration
In the mid-1950s, Johns destroyed much of his earlier work and sought motifs that were "found" or pre-existing—ordinary, instantly recognizable images that allowed him to sidestep subjective expression (dominant in Abstract Expressionism) and focus on painterly process, surface, and viewing. Targets were ideal: they are both representational (a real object) and abstract (concentric circles), functioning as devices for aiming/seeing while inviting scrutiny of how we perceive art itself.
Gray, in particular, served multiple roles: it neutralized color to emphasize tactility and the "object nature" of the painting; evoked skepticism, ambiguity, or emotional coolness ("the gray zone between two extremes"); and distanced the work from bold, gestural Ab Ex palettes. Johns used encaustic (pigment mixed with hot wax) for its translucent, textured, luminous quality, often incorporating newspaper collage for added surface activation.
This approach treated the canvas as both image and physical thing, encouraging viewers to engage with process, repetition, and shifting meanings rather than narrative or emotion.
Key Details of Gray Target (1958) at Christie's
The work up for auction in Christie's "Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse" sale (May 2026) is Gray Target (1958): encaustic on canvas, 42 x 42 in. (106.7 x 106.7 cm.), signed, dated, and titled on the reverse. It has an illustrious provenance (Leo Castelli Gallery → Sonnabend → Newhouse) and extensive exhibition history, including early shows in Europe and major retrospectives. It was featured in the landmark Jasper Johns: Gray exhibition (Art Institute of Chicago/Metropolitan Museum, 2007–2008).
This monochrome version strips the target of primary colors (common in earlier examples), heightening focus on texture, subtle tonal variations, and the concentric form as a meditative or perceptual field.
Various Examples in the Late 1950s
Johns produced dozens of target paintings and drawings from 1955 to 1961. Key late-1950s examples include:
Reception
Early reception was mixed but transformative. Johns's 1958 Castelli show (including targets and flags) was a sensation, praised for its cool detachment and challenge to Ab Ex orthodoxy. Critics and peers (e.g., via Rauschenberg collaboration) saw it as ushering in a new era of irony, literalism, and everyday imagery. Some found the deadpan approach enigmatic or withholding; others celebrated its perceptual depth. The gray works, in particular, were noted for their tactile richness and emotional reserve.
Legacy
Johns's targets and gray monochromes profoundly influenced subsequent art. They prefigured Pop Art's embrace of common signs, Minimalism's objecthood and seriality, and Conceptualism's idea-driven focus. His use of gray as a versatile, ambivalent color inspired explorations of monochrome and materiality. The Jasper Johns: Gray exhibition highlighted how this "thread" reveals infinite variety in restraint. Works like Gray Target remain icons of postwar American art, commanding high value (this one estimated in the millions) and continuing to "break hearts" through subtle power.
This Christie's Gray Target embodies Johns at his most refined: a familiar symbol rendered unfamiliar, inviting endless looking in a restrained palette that rewards close attention to surface and implication.
Encaustic application in Gray Target (1958) and Related Works
In Gray Target, the encaustic creates a richly textured monochrome surface where individual brushstrokes "rise off the canvas," giving a third-dimensional quality. Light interacts with the varied grays, enhancing depth despite the restricted palette. The technique's speed allowed Johns to work in concentrated sessions while retaining evidence of the hand.
Compare to colorful targets like Target with Four Faces (1955, MoMA): encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas, with the wax preserving gestural marks and allowing the collage to peek through. In gray versions, the absence of color shifts emphasis entirely to surface, touch, and ambiguity.
This medium was ideal for Johns's serial exploration (flags, targets, numbers) because it made each iteration feel handmade and unique, even when depicting "found" impersonal images. It bridged painting and sculpture, influencing his later object incorporations.
Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is a pivotal American artist whose mid-1950s shift from Abstract Expressionism to everyday symbols like flags, numbers, maps, and targets helped bridge to Pop Art while influencing Minimalism and Conceptual Art. His gray monochrome works, particularly the targets from the late 1950s, exemplify his interest in perception, materiality, and ambiguity.
Intention and Inspiration
In the mid-1950s, Johns destroyed much of his earlier work and sought motifs that were "found" or pre-existing—ordinary, instantly recognizable images that allowed him to sidestep subjective expression (dominant in Abstract Expressionism) and focus on painterly process, surface, and viewing. Targets were ideal: they are both representational (a real object) and abstract (concentric circles), functioning as devices for aiming/seeing while inviting scrutiny of how we perceive art itself.
Gray, in particular, served multiple roles: it neutralized color to emphasize tactility and the "object nature" of the painting; evoked skepticism, ambiguity, or emotional coolness ("the gray zone between two extremes"); and distanced the work from bold, gestural Ab Ex palettes. Johns used encaustic (pigment mixed with hot wax) for its translucent, textured, luminous quality, often incorporating newspaper collage for added surface activation.
This approach treated the canvas as both image and physical thing, encouraging viewers to engage with process, repetition, and shifting meanings rather than narrative or emotion.
Key Details of Gray Target (1958) at Christie's
The work up for auction in Christie's "Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse" sale (May 2026) is Gray Target (1958): encaustic on canvas, 42 x 42 in. (106.7 x 106.7 cm.), signed, dated, and titled on the reverse. It has an illustrious provenance (Leo Castelli Gallery → Sonnabend → Newhouse) and extensive exhibition history, including early shows in Europe and major retrospectives. It was featured in the landmark Jasper Johns: Gray exhibition (Art Institute of Chicago/Metropolitan Museum, 2007–2008).
This monochrome version strips the target of primary colors (common in earlier examples), heightening focus on texture, subtle tonal variations, and the concentric form as a meditative or perceptual field.
Various Examples in the Late 1950s
Johns produced dozens of target paintings and drawings from 1955 to 1961. Key late-1950s examples include:
- Target with Four Faces (1955, MoMA): Primary-colored target with a hinged wooden compartment holding plaster casts of faces (from the same model, mouths progressing but rearranged by Johns to avoid narrative). Combines painting with sculpture for ambiguity about seeing/speaking.
- Target with Plaster Casts (1955): Similar, with colorful body-part casts (including more intimate ones) in compartments above the target.
- Other monochrome or gray-inflected targets and related works, such as those exploring the motif in encaustic with varying textures or added elements. Gray versions (like the 1958 one) parallel his gray flags, numbers (Gray Numbers, 1958), and alphabets, showing serial exploration across motifs.
Reception
Early reception was mixed but transformative. Johns's 1958 Castelli show (including targets and flags) was a sensation, praised for its cool detachment and challenge to Ab Ex orthodoxy. Critics and peers (e.g., via Rauschenberg collaboration) saw it as ushering in a new era of irony, literalism, and everyday imagery. Some found the deadpan approach enigmatic or withholding; others celebrated its perceptual depth. The gray works, in particular, were noted for their tactile richness and emotional reserve.
Legacy
Johns's targets and gray monochromes profoundly influenced subsequent art. They prefigured Pop Art's embrace of common signs, Minimalism's objecthood and seriality, and Conceptualism's idea-driven focus. His use of gray as a versatile, ambivalent color inspired explorations of monochrome and materiality. The Jasper Johns: Gray exhibition highlighted how this "thread" reveals infinite variety in restraint. Works like Gray Target remain icons of postwar American art, commanding high value (this one estimated in the millions) and continuing to "break hearts" through subtle power.
This Christie's Gray Target embodies Johns at his most refined: a familiar symbol rendered unfamiliar, inviting endless looking in a restrained palette that rewards close attention to surface and implication.
Encaustic application in Gray Target (1958) and Related Works
In Gray Target, the encaustic creates a richly textured monochrome surface where individual brushstrokes "rise off the canvas," giving a third-dimensional quality. Light interacts with the varied grays, enhancing depth despite the restricted palette. The technique's speed allowed Johns to work in concentrated sessions while retaining evidence of the hand.
Compare to colorful targets like Target with Four Faces (1955, MoMA): encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas, with the wax preserving gestural marks and allowing the collage to peek through. In gray versions, the absence of color shifts emphasis entirely to surface, touch, and ambiguity.
This medium was ideal for Johns's serial exploration (flags, targets, numbers) because it made each iteration feel handmade and unique, even when depicting "found" impersonal images. It bridged painting and sculpture, influencing his later object incorporations.
Special Report
Influence of Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines (roughly 1954–1964) profoundly influenced Jasper Johns, particularly in the context of works like Alley Oop (1958) and the color explorations leading to False Start (1959). Their close personal and artistic partnership (as lovers and collaborators in the mid-1950s) created a rich dialogue of mutual influence.
What Are Rauschenberg’s Combines?
Rauschenberg coined the term “Combine” for hybrid works that blurred painting, sculpture, and collage. He incorporated everyday objects, found materials, newspaper clippings, fabrics, photographs, taxidermy, lights, and more onto painted surfaces. Iconic examples include:
Specific Influence on Johns’s Alley Oop and Related Works
Alley Oop, oil and printed paper collage on cardboard mounted on Masonite 59 x 46 cm executed in 1958 by Jasper Johns, was sold for $ 5.8M by Christie's on May 18, 2026, lot 14A. in the sale of the Newhouse collection.
It was a personal work—gifted directly to Rauschenberg, Johns's close partner and collaborator at the time.
Color Experiments and Anticipation of Later Works
The query highlights its role in new experiments on colors, anticipating Figure 4 (1959) and especially the groundbreaking False Start (1959).
What Are Rauschenberg’s Combines?
Rauschenberg coined the term “Combine” for hybrid works that blurred painting, sculpture, and collage. He incorporated everyday objects, found materials, newspaper clippings, fabrics, photographs, taxidermy, lights, and more onto painted surfaces. Iconic examples include:
- Bed (1955): His own quilt and pillow, splashed with paint.
- Monogram (1955–59): A taxidermied goat with a tire.
- Collection (1954) and Charlene (1954): Multi-panel works with layered paint, collage, fabric, mirrors, and comic strips.
Specific Influence on Johns’s Alley Oop and Related Works
- Comic Strips and Found Imagery: Rauschenberg included comic strip fragments in Collection and Charlene (1954), notably a Moon Mullins strip featuring the exclamation “Alley Oop!” (referencing the acrobatic phrase, not necessarily the caveman comic). Johns’s Alley Oop (1958) directly echoes this by collaging and overpainting panels from V.T. Hamlin’s Alley Oop comic strip. Scholars like Jonathan D. Katz interpret this as a coded, intimate reference in their private “secret language,” especially since Johns gifted the painting to Rauschenberg.
- Newspaper and Collage Techniques: Both artists used newsprint and collage for texture and topicality. Rauschenberg’s messy, additive approach encouraged Johns to experiment with embedding materials (e.g., in Alley Oop’s cardboard collage and encaustic-like surfaces elsewhere). Johns’s precise overpainting contrasts Rauschenberg’s openness, but the shared use of ephemera bridges their practices.
- Hybridity and Materiality: Rauschenberg’s Combines freed Johns to treat paintings as objects with physical presence, influencing the tactile quality in Alley Oop and the gestural energy in False Start.
- Reciprocal Influence: Rauschenberg’s spontaneity and embrace of the everyday pushed Johns beyond pure abstraction toward recognizable signs (flags, targets). Conversely, Johns’s disciplined focus on icons helped Rauschenberg refine his assemblages. They collaborated practically (e.g., designing window displays) and critiqued each other’s work.
- Neo-Dada and Proto-Pop: Their combined output rejected Abstract Expressionism’s heroism in favor of irony, appropriation, and everyday life—paving the way for Pop Art. Rauschenberg’s Combines provided a model for incorporating mass culture; Johns refined it into more conceptual territory (e.g., color mismatches in False Start as a linguistic game).
- Personal Dimension: Their relationship added emotional depth. Works like Alley Oop can be seen as private dialogues, with public implications for themes of camouflage, identity, and meaning.
Alley Oop, oil and printed paper collage on cardboard mounted on Masonite 59 x 46 cm executed in 1958 by Jasper Johns, was sold for $ 5.8M by Christie's on May 18, 2026, lot 14A. in the sale of the Newhouse collection.
It was a personal work—gifted directly to Rauschenberg, Johns's close partner and collaborator at the time.
Color Experiments and Anticipation of Later Works
The query highlights its role in new experiments on colors, anticipating Figure 4 (1959) and especially the groundbreaking False Start (1959).
- Johns was exploring color as both structural and perceptual—using vibrant, sometimes arbitrary or labeled hues that challenge straightforward reading. In Alley Oop, the overpainting and collage create a dense, tactile surface with gestural brushwork that plays with visibility and hiding.
- This feeds directly into color-number explorations in Figure 4 ( encaustic and collage, sold for $17.4 million at Christie's in 2007) and the more radical False Start, where stenciled color names (red, yellow, blue, etc.) are deliberately mismatched with the actual painted areas, undermining language and perception.
- Alley Oop tests similar ideas on a smaller, more intimate scale: the comic's inherent colors and forms are abstracted and repainted, creating ambiguity between source and intervention.
1959 Figure 4
2007 SOLD for $ 17.4M by Christie's
Jasper Johns bases his early art on figures that are immediately familiar to every US people : the US flag, the concentric target and from 1955 the Arabic numerals in single figures or in various configurations of rows and columns, executed in a creamy white encaustic over a newspaper collage.
Figure 4 features a beautiful full size 4 mingled with its surrounding of bright primary colors painted in 1959 in the style of the False Start of the same year. This oil, encaustic and collage on canvas 51 x 39 cm was sold for $ 17.4M by Christie's on May 16, 2007, lot 25.
From ca 1960 he achieves a quasi abstract expression by superimposing the ten numerals in a single size and centering. Between 1960 and 1961, he made eleven paintings, one sculpture and two drawings, invariably titled 0 through 9. The unique 1961 drawing, charcoal and pastel on paper 137 x 106 cm was sold for $ 10.9M by Sotheby's on November 9, 2004, lot 25. In this magma of hat final state the numerals have lost all their individual meaning.
Figure 4 features a beautiful full size 4 mingled with its surrounding of bright primary colors painted in 1959 in the style of the False Start of the same year. This oil, encaustic and collage on canvas 51 x 39 cm was sold for $ 17.4M by Christie's on May 16, 2007, lot 25.
From ca 1960 he achieves a quasi abstract expression by superimposing the ten numerals in a single size and centering. Between 1960 and 1961, he made eleven paintings, one sculpture and two drawings, invariably titled 0 through 9. The unique 1961 drawing, charcoal and pastel on paper 137 x 106 cm was sold for $ 10.9M by Sotheby's on November 9, 2004, lot 25. In this magma of hat final state the numerals have lost all their individual meaning.
False Start
masterpiece
1959
In the mid 1950s, young artists around Robert Rauschenberg redefine the meaning of art. Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, who both were Rauschenberg's lovers, respectively explore the triviality of the message and the proto-writing, which are actually two variants within the same trend.
Johns does not compose, he reuses. The flags, targets, numbers and letters that appear altogether early in his career have no meaning and do not bring any emotion. He welcomes the colors as codified before him and this is the deep significance of his use of the US flag wrongly regarded as a patriotic expression.
To master the absence of message, Johns should control the material. He uses as early as 1954 a thick encaustic wax that dries quickly enough so that a new supply does not alter the previous layers. His brushstroke is indeed an opposite to Kline's action painting.
These young artists soon featured by Castelli reject the expressionism and are not concerned in the pop art in the sense of their contemporaries Lichtenstein and Warhol. Their movement is sometimes called Neo-Dadaism.
The False Start series of three works was started in 1959 to display colors with wrong labels. For example the word GRAY is painted in red stenciled letters on a patch of yellow, and so on. It is indeed a false start in the sense of horse racing and arguably reflects a doubt of Johns in his own art. The burst of blowing colors in nervous brushstrokes may include hidden numerals. After the predetermined colors of the Flag, it is indeed a way conceived by Johns to become abstract.
Johns does not compose, he reuses. The flags, targets, numbers and letters that appear altogether early in his career have no meaning and do not bring any emotion. He welcomes the colors as codified before him and this is the deep significance of his use of the US flag wrongly regarded as a patriotic expression.
To master the absence of message, Johns should control the material. He uses as early as 1954 a thick encaustic wax that dries quickly enough so that a new supply does not alter the previous layers. His brushstroke is indeed an opposite to Kline's action painting.
These young artists soon featured by Castelli reject the expressionism and are not concerned in the pop art in the sense of their contemporaries Lichtenstein and Warhol. Their movement is sometimes called Neo-Dadaism.
The False Start series of three works was started in 1959 to display colors with wrong labels. For example the word GRAY is painted in red stenciled letters on a patch of yellow, and so on. It is indeed a false start in the sense of horse racing and arguably reflects a doubt of Johns in his own art. The burst of blowing colors in nervous brushstrokes may include hidden numerals. After the predetermined colors of the Flag, it is indeed a way conceived by Johns to become abstract.
Jasper Johns's False Start (1959) is a landmark painting that epitomizes his exploration of language, perception, color, and contradiction. It builds directly on the color experiments seen in works like Alley Oop (1958), pushing them into a more explosive, large-scale format.
The Core Concept: Deliberate Color Mismatches
Johns stenciled common color names--RED, YELLOW, BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN, WHITE, GRAY, etc.—directly onto the canvas in bold, uppercase letters. He then painted the surrounding areas (and often over or around the words) in colors that frequently do not match the labels.
For example:
Visual and Technical Details
The painting features a dynamic, chaotic field of thick, expressive brushwork in a bright palette. Stenciled words float, overlap, and partially disappear under or amid the paint, emphasizing process and layering. Its scale (roughly 170 x 132 cm for the primary version) amplifies the immersive, almost overwhelming effect.Johns also produced related works, including a 1960 collage version (Small False Start) and prints like False Start I (1962 lithograph), which reinterpret the theme with variations in color and composition.
Meaning and Interpretation
False Start (along with related color-number works like Figure 4) marked a breakthrough in Johns's oeuvre, helping establish him as a pivotal figure transitioning from AbEx to Pop and beyond. The original 1959 painting sold for a then-record $17 million in 1988 to S.I. Newhouse (a huge sum at the time). A related Small False Start (1960) set a new auction record for Johns at $55.35 million in 2022.
In relation to Alley Oop: Both works experiment with color application over found or structured elements (Alley Oop via comic collage; False Start via text). Alley Oop feels more intimate and camouflaged, while False Start explodes the idea into a bolder critique of representation. Together, they show Johns refining his strategy of using the familiar against itself to reveal deeper truths about seeing and knowing.
This mismatch technique remains one of Johns's most influential innovations, inviting endless reinterpretation.
The Core Concept: Deliberate Color Mismatches
Johns stenciled common color names--RED, YELLOW, BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN, WHITE, GRAY, etc.—directly onto the canvas in bold, uppercase letters. He then painted the surrounding areas (and often over or around the words) in colors that frequently do not match the labels.
For example:
- The word "RED" might appear in a patch of blue or yellow paint.
- "YELLOW" could sit amid reds, blues, or grays.
- Brushstrokes are gestural and energetic, creating overlapping layers of vibrant primary and secondary colors in a dense, all-over composition reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism (think de Kooning or Pollock), but subverted by the textual elements.
Visual and Technical Details
The painting features a dynamic, chaotic field of thick, expressive brushwork in a bright palette. Stenciled words float, overlap, and partially disappear under or amid the paint, emphasizing process and layering. Its scale (roughly 170 x 132 cm for the primary version) amplifies the immersive, almost overwhelming effect.Johns also produced related works, including a 1960 collage version (Small False Start) and prints like False Start I (1962 lithograph), which reinterpret the theme with variations in color and composition.
Meaning and Interpretation
- Challenging Language and Signs: Building on Johns's earlier use of familiar icons (flags, targets, numbers), False Start interrogates how we assign meaning. Color names are arbitrary conventions; the painting exposes their fragility. It asks: Does "red" inherently mean the color red, or is it just a label we agree upon?
- Perception and Cognition: The mismatches create a "false start" in the viewer's attempt to read the image logically. This forces active engagement—your brain toggles between seeing the colors and reading the words, highlighting the gap between sensation and interpretation.
- Artistic Process and Irony: The title evokes a runner's false start in a race or an artist's hesitation/revision. Johns has linked it to sitting in the Cedar Tavern (a hub for Abstract Expressionists) and reflecting on color. It parodies the emotional intensity of AbEx while injecting humor, detachment, and intellectual play—bridging gestural abstraction with emerging Pop sensibilities.
- Broader Context: It aligns with Johns's interest in Duchampian irony, semiotics, and Wittgenstein-inspired ideas about language games. It also prefigures conceptual art's focus on systems and rules.
False Start (along with related color-number works like Figure 4) marked a breakthrough in Johns's oeuvre, helping establish him as a pivotal figure transitioning from AbEx to Pop and beyond. The original 1959 painting sold for a then-record $17 million in 1988 to S.I. Newhouse (a huge sum at the time). A related Small False Start (1960) set a new auction record for Johns at $55.35 million in 2022.
In relation to Alley Oop: Both works experiment with color application over found or structured elements (Alley Oop via comic collage; False Start via text). Alley Oop feels more intimate and camouflaged, while False Start explodes the idea into a bolder critique of representation. Together, they show Johns refining his strategy of using the familiar against itself to reveal deeper truths about seeing and knowing.
This mismatch technique remains one of Johns's most influential innovations, inviting endless reinterpretation.
False Start (1959) by Jasper Johns: Meaning and Significance
Overview
False Start is one of Jasper Johns’s most iconic and expensive paintings (it sold for $80 million in 2006, then the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist). It is a large (68 × 54 in) oil on canvas dominated by explosive brushstrokes in vivid primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—over a grayish ground. Stenciled color names (“RED,” “BLUE,” “YELLOW,” “ORANGE,” “GREEN,” etc.) are scattered across the surface, but almost always in deliberate mismatch: the word “RED” is painted in blue or yellow strokes, “BLUE” in orange or red, and so on.
Core Meaning and Interpretation
The painting is a quintessential example of Johns’s early investigation into semiotics, perception, and the instability of language and representation:
Overview
False Start is one of Jasper Johns’s most iconic and expensive paintings (it sold for $80 million in 2006, then the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist). It is a large (68 × 54 in) oil on canvas dominated by explosive brushstrokes in vivid primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—over a grayish ground. Stenciled color names (“RED,” “BLUE,” “YELLOW,” “ORANGE,” “GREEN,” etc.) are scattered across the surface, but almost always in deliberate mismatch: the word “RED” is painted in blue or yellow strokes, “BLUE” in orange or red, and so on.
Core Meaning and Interpretation
The painting is a quintessential example of Johns’s early investigation into semiotics, perception, and the instability of language and representation:
- Word vs. Thing: Johns takes the most basic elements of painting—color—and pairs them with their linguistic labels, then systematically violates the expected correspondence. This creates a visual/verbal paradox: the viewer “sees” red but “reads” “BLUE.” It forces a conflict between optical experience and intellectual naming.
- “Things the mind already knows”: Johns famously said he wanted to paint “things the mind already knows” (flags, targets, numbers, letters). Color names are among the first things a child learns, yet here they are made strange and unreliable.
- Ambiguity and duplicity: The title “False Start” itself plays on the idea of a failed or premature beginning—whether in a race, a painting, or meaning-making. Every attempt to pin down a stable meaning “false starts.”
- Critique of Abstract Expressionism: Made at the exact moment AbEx (de Kooning, Pollock) still dominated, False Start uses gestural, all-over brushwork that looks spontaneous and emotional, but is actually coolly calculated and ironic. Johns borrows the heroic brushstroke of AbEx only to empty it of personal expression and fill it with detached conceptual games.
- Pivotal breakthrough (1959)
Along with Flag (1954–55), Target paintings, and Numbers series, False Start marks the full maturation of Johns’s signature strategy: taking pre-existing, familiar images or systems and subjecting them to subtle but radical displacement. - Bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop / Conceptual Art
- It retains the scale, gesture, and paint-handling of AbEx, but replaces emotion and myth with irony and intellect → crucial hinge toward Pop (Warhol, Lichtenstein) and early Conceptual art.
- Robert Rauschenberg (Johns’s partner at the time) and Johns together effectively ended the reign of Abstract Expressionism.
- Market and institutional triumph
- Shown in Johns’s legendary 1958 solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery (his first), where Alfred Barr bought three works on the spot for MoMA.
- False Start itself was bought by collector Richard Brown Baker and later became the poster child for the 1980s–2000s art-market boom.
- Template for the rest of Johns’s oeuvre
The color-name mismatch device reappears throughout his career:- Painting with Two Balls (1960)
- Perilous Night (1982)
- The late Catenary series* (1997–2000s)
- Even the recent “5 Postcards” (2011) and Regrets series (2013) still play with misregistration and semantic slippage.
1959
1988 SOLD for $ 17M by Sotheby's
A Fall Start in large version 170 x 132 cm executed in 1959 by Johns was sold for $ 17M by Sotheby's on November 10, 1988 and privately purchased for a reported $ 80M by Ken Griffin to David Geffen in October 2006.
1960 small
2022 SOLD for $ 55M by Christie's
A small False Start, encaustic and acrylic made of overlapping or disjointed collages of torn papers on raw fiberboard 56 x 46 cm executed in 1960, was sold for $ 55M by Christie's on November 9, 2022, lot 30 in the sale of the Paul G. Allen collection. Allen was amazed by the new kinds of language in Johns's art and viewed his Numerals as a precursor of digital art.
Response by Grok :
Quote
Christie's @ChristiesInc Nov 10, 2022
#AuctionRecord From the Paul G. Allen Collection, ‘Small False Start’ by Jasper Johns set an auction record for the artist with a price realized of $55.35 million
Response by Grok :
Quote
Christie's @ChristiesInc Nov 10, 2022
#AuctionRecord From the Paul G. Allen Collection, ‘Small False Start’ by Jasper Johns set an auction record for the artist with a price realized of $55.35 million
- The artwork "Small False Start" by Jasper Johns, sold for $55.35 million at Christie's in 2022, reflects his innovative use of color and stenciled words, a technique inspired by his early experiments with abstraction, as noted in a 1960s study by art historian Leo Steinberg on Johns' influence on Pop Art.
- This sale was part of the Paul G. Allen Collection auction, which totaled over $1.6 billion, setting a record for single-owner sales, with proceeds supporting philanthropy, a move echoing Allen’s lesser-known $2 billion lifetime charitable donations documented by the Giving Pledge.
- The high value challenges the mainstream art market narrative that abstract works are less commercially viable than representational art, with data from Artnet showing a 40% increase in abstract art auction prices since 2010, driven by collectors' growing interest in conceptual depth.
1960-1966 Flag
2010 SOLD for $ 28.6M by Christie's
Jasper Johns' Flags had been the first icons of Pop Art that terminated the dominance of the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning and opened the gates to the consumerist images of Warhol and Lichtenstein."
Castelli owned until his death in 1999 a Flag executed by Johns in 1958. It was sold in private sale by his sonto Steve Cohen in March 2010. Details were not released but the price of $ 110M has not been denied.
A Flag painted between 1960 and 1966 was sold by Christie's for $ 28.6M on May 11, 2010. Measuring 43 x 66 cm, it is twice smaller than the Castelli-Cohen specimen.
The technique of encaustic and newspaper on canvas creates a unique texture to these works, such as to fascinate the observer as much as a Rothko can do.
Jasper Johns's Flag (1960–1966): From Seminal Origins to Auction Icon
Jasper Johns's iconic Flag series revolutionized postwar American art by appropriating everyday symbols like the American flag—images "the mind already knows," as Johns described them—transforming them from passive emblems into textured, layered meditations on perception, materiality, and national identity. The 1960–1966 Flag, an encaustic-on-canvas work (dimensions approximately 72 x 54 inches) from the collection of author Michael Crichton, exemplifies the series' maturation. It sold at Christie's New York on May 11, 2010, for $28.6 million (including fees), shattering the artist's previous auction record and underscoring the flag motif's enduring market and cultural power. This sale, part of a postwar and contemporary art auction, highlighted Johns's bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, drawing bids amid a recovering art market post-2008.
To trace its evolution from the seminal 1954–1955 Flag at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), consider the series' progression across the 1950s and 1960s. Johns produced over 40 flag variations, shifting from raw, dream-inspired innovation to refined experimentation with media, scale, color, and form. This trajectory reflects his growing interest in the flag's dual role as patriotic icon and abstract surface, influenced by the Cold War-era tensions of McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare, where symbols like the flag carried loaded connotations of conformity and exclusion.
Key Evolutionary Stages in the Flag Series
The following table outlines pivotal works, highlighting technical and conceptual shifts:
1954–1955
Flag (Seminal MoMA version)
Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood (three panels)
Dream-inspired debut; layered newsprint collages under red-white-blue stripes create a rough, tactile surface with visible 1950s headlines (e.g., inconsequential ads, avoiding politics). Challenges Abstract Expressionism by fixing the image, forcing scrutiny of "seen but not examined" symbols. 48 stars evoke pre-Alaska/Hawaii era.
42¼ × 60⅝ in; MoMA, New York (gift of Philip Johnson, 1973)
1955
White Flag
Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on canvas (three panels)
First monochrome variant; drains color to emphasize form and texture, rendering the flag "ghostlike" and ambiguous—neither fully patriotic nor abstract. Highlights encaustic's sculptural buildup, with impastoed stars and stripes.
78 × 120¾ in; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
1958
Three Flags
Encaustic and college on canvas (three stacked canvases)Multi-layered composition (three flags in diminishing scale, totaling 84 stars); projects 5 inches from the wall, blurring painting/sculpture boundaries. Amplifies repetition to probe depth and illusion, amid Johns's rise via Leo Castelli Gallery.
30½ × 40½ × 4¾ in (protruding); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1960
Flag (Bronze sculpture)
Cast bronze with silver plating
Material pivot to sculpture; replicates encaustic texture via industrial casting, making the flag a solid, eternal object. Signals Johns's cross-medium exploration, treating the motif as a "thing" beyond canvas.
6 × 4 × 1 in (edition of 4); Art Institute of Chicago
1960–1966
Flag (Christie's 2010 sale)Encaustic on canvas
Culmination of early flags; retains vibrant colors and waxen impasto but with matured brushwork—more gestural, less collaged—evoking commodification and "American-ness" in a Pop-leaning era. Hangs as cultural icon, once in Crichton's bedroom; its 2010 sale (est. $10–15M) reflects market boom and Johns's influence on Warhol, Lichtenstein, et al.
~72 × 54 in; Private collection (post-sale)
Conceptual and Technical Evolution
Castelli owned until his death in 1999 a Flag executed by Johns in 1958. It was sold in private sale by his sonto Steve Cohen in March 2010. Details were not released but the price of $ 110M has not been denied.
A Flag painted between 1960 and 1966 was sold by Christie's for $ 28.6M on May 11, 2010. Measuring 43 x 66 cm, it is twice smaller than the Castelli-Cohen specimen.
The technique of encaustic and newspaper on canvas creates a unique texture to these works, such as to fascinate the observer as much as a Rothko can do.
Jasper Johns's Flag (1960–1966): From Seminal Origins to Auction Icon
Jasper Johns's iconic Flag series revolutionized postwar American art by appropriating everyday symbols like the American flag—images "the mind already knows," as Johns described them—transforming them from passive emblems into textured, layered meditations on perception, materiality, and national identity. The 1960–1966 Flag, an encaustic-on-canvas work (dimensions approximately 72 x 54 inches) from the collection of author Michael Crichton, exemplifies the series' maturation. It sold at Christie's New York on May 11, 2010, for $28.6 million (including fees), shattering the artist's previous auction record and underscoring the flag motif's enduring market and cultural power. This sale, part of a postwar and contemporary art auction, highlighted Johns's bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, drawing bids amid a recovering art market post-2008.
To trace its evolution from the seminal 1954–1955 Flag at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), consider the series' progression across the 1950s and 1960s. Johns produced over 40 flag variations, shifting from raw, dream-inspired innovation to refined experimentation with media, scale, color, and form. This trajectory reflects his growing interest in the flag's dual role as patriotic icon and abstract surface, influenced by the Cold War-era tensions of McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare, where symbols like the flag carried loaded connotations of conformity and exclusion.
Key Evolutionary Stages in the Flag Series
The following table outlines pivotal works, highlighting technical and conceptual shifts:
1954–1955
Flag (Seminal MoMA version)
Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood (three panels)
Dream-inspired debut; layered newsprint collages under red-white-blue stripes create a rough, tactile surface with visible 1950s headlines (e.g., inconsequential ads, avoiding politics). Challenges Abstract Expressionism by fixing the image, forcing scrutiny of "seen but not examined" symbols. 48 stars evoke pre-Alaska/Hawaii era.
42¼ × 60⅝ in; MoMA, New York (gift of Philip Johnson, 1973)
1955
White Flag
Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on canvas (three panels)
First monochrome variant; drains color to emphasize form and texture, rendering the flag "ghostlike" and ambiguous—neither fully patriotic nor abstract. Highlights encaustic's sculptural buildup, with impastoed stars and stripes.
78 × 120¾ in; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
1958
Three Flags
Encaustic and college on canvas (three stacked canvases)Multi-layered composition (three flags in diminishing scale, totaling 84 stars); projects 5 inches from the wall, blurring painting/sculpture boundaries. Amplifies repetition to probe depth and illusion, amid Johns's rise via Leo Castelli Gallery.
30½ × 40½ × 4¾ in (protruding); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1960
Flag (Bronze sculpture)
Cast bronze with silver plating
Material pivot to sculpture; replicates encaustic texture via industrial casting, making the flag a solid, eternal object. Signals Johns's cross-medium exploration, treating the motif as a "thing" beyond canvas.
6 × 4 × 1 in (edition of 4); Art Institute of Chicago
1960–1966
Flag (Christie's 2010 sale)Encaustic on canvas
Culmination of early flags; retains vibrant colors and waxen impasto but with matured brushwork—more gestural, less collaged—evoking commodification and "American-ness" in a Pop-leaning era. Hangs as cultural icon, once in Crichton's bedroom; its 2010 sale (est. $10–15M) reflects market boom and Johns's influence on Warhol, Lichtenstein, et al.
~72 × 54 in; Private collection (post-sale)
Conceptual and Technical Evolution
- 1950s Foundations (Post-Dream Innovation): The MoMA Flag marked Johns's break from gestural abstraction, inspired by a 1954 dream. Encaustic—a hot-wax medium revived from antiquity—allowed rapid layering over newsprint, embedding history (e.g., dated clippings) while preserving brushstrokes' sensuality. This "flattening" of the image democratized it, critiquing emotional excess in Pollock-era art and prefiguring Pop's irony.
- Mid-1950s Experimentation (Monochrome and Repetition): Works like White Flag desaturate the motif, shifting focus to materiality—wax's luminosity mimics snow or erasure, evoking existential voids amid 1950s repression. Three Flags introduces seriality, stacking canvases to create optical push-pull, aligning with Johns's interest in perception (influenced by Marcel Duchamp).
- 1960s Refinement (Sculpture and Maturity): By 1960, Johns casts the flag in bronze, industrializing its texture and questioning reproducibility (echoing his numbers/targets series). The 1960–1966 Flag synthesizes this: bolder gestures on a single canvas, less collage, more emphasis on paint's physicality. Created amid Johns's peak fame (post-Venice Biennale 1958), it embodies the flag as both "supreme image of American national identity" and commodified object, paving for Minimalism and Conceptualism.
Special Report
Influence on Warhol
Jasper Johns (b. 1930) was a crucial bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and his work profoundly influenced Andy Warhol in the late 1950s–early 1960s. Johns helped shift American art toward everyday objects, signs, and found imagery, paving the way for Warhol’s consumer icons like the Campbell’s Soup Cans.
Key Aspects of Johns' Influence on Warhol
Everyday Objects and Signs as Subject Matter:
Key Aspects of Johns' Influence on Warhol
Everyday Objects and Signs as Subject Matter:
- Johns famously used familiar, “pre-given” motifs such as the American flag (Flag, 1954–55), targets (Target with Plaster Casts, 1955), numbers, letters, and maps. These were not invented or expressive like Abstract Expressionist gestures but borrowed and re-presented, creating ambiguity between representation and reality.
- This directly inspired Warhol’s choice of mundane, ubiquitous items like soup cans. Before Warhol’s Soup Cans, Johns created sculptural painted bronzes of everyday objects (e.g., Painted Bronze with Ballantine Ale cans, 1960, and a Savarin coffee can). Warhol’s serial consumer goods echoed Johns’ deadpan presentation of the ordinary.
- Johns (along with Robert Rauschenberg) introduced a Neo-Dada sensibility—using encaustic, collage, and found elements to challenge Abstract Expressionism’s emotional intensity and originality. His work was cool, intellectual, and focused on perception, semiotics, and the act of looking.
- Warhol admired this detachment. He collected Johns’ work early on (e.g., buying a drawing and lithographs) and absorbed the idea that art could appropriate mass-culture symbols without overt personal expression. Warhol took it further into pure repetition and mechanical reproduction.
- Johns’ meticulous, layered painting (often with encaustic for texture) and use of stencils/stamps influenced Warhol’s precise, projector-traced, and hand-painted Soup Cans (with stamped fleur-de-lis details). Both artists emphasized craft while mimicking mechanical or commercial looks.
- Johns’ influence helped Warhol move beyond his commercial blotted-line illustrations toward a fine-art practice grounded in replication.
- Johns’ breakthrough 1958 solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery stunned the New York art world and signaled the decline of pure AbEx dominance. Warhol, still working as an illustrator, saw this as a path forward.
- By 1961–62, Warhol was experimenting with comic strips and ads before landing on the Soup Cans (inspired in part by a suggestion to paint something familiar, akin to Johns’ flags/targets). The Ferus Gallery show in 1962 positioned Warhol as Pop’s face, building on Johns’ foundation.
- Johns: Ambiguous, layered, and often withholding—his flags/targets invite questions about symbolism, nationality, and representation. His work retains painterly depth and personal reserve.
- Warhol: More deadpan, serial, and surface-oriented. He embraced mechanical processes (silkscreen soon after Soup Cans) and celebrity/consumer culture with ironic detachment or apparent superficiality. Warhol made the iconographic even more iconic and reproducible.
1968 Aluminum Numbers
2022 SOLD for $ 17.6M by Christie's
In his quest for the emotionally disengaged roots of art, Jasper Johns relied from the mid 1950s on non-naturalistic figures : the US flag, the target and the sequence of numbers. He tried his hand with a high variety of paints and supports, including plaster relief for a target as early as 1955.
His first experiences with grids had been made in 1952. From 1958, 0-9 features the 10 numerals as a grid of 2 rows and 5 columns in the normal sequence.
In 1964 he was commissioned for a monumental grid of numbers for the use of the lobby of the theater of the Lincoln Center in Manhattan. This work titled Numbers is made of separate painted metal panels of one numeral each, bolted together for an overall size of 275 x 213 cm. Sequences of numerals are a path to infinity when considering that they can build unlimited numbers. A footprint of Merce Cunningham superseded a numeral toward the upper right corner of that original.
Johns's project to complement the Lincoln Numbers by a bronze failed in 1968. An aluminum variant of Numbers, 146 x 110 cm in gray, was cast in the same year. It displays a grid of 11 rows and 11 columns in the normal sequence 0-9 of the numerals so that each next row or column begins with the next numeral. The stenciled numerals had been taken from a commercially available set.
The artist kept the aluminum Numbers until he sold it to Paul G. Allen in 2001. From that collection, it was sold for $ 17.6M by Christie's on November 9, 2022, lot 49.
Johns acted as artistic advisor to Cunningham’s dance company from 1967 to 1980,
Johns resumed in 2008 the project of number sequences in bronze, aluminum, silver, and copper. 0-9 with Merce's Footprint is a bronze 49 x 94 x 1.9 cm , cast in 2009 in an edition of 3 in different patinas. Cunningham's footprint is a new version. It does not have a separate block but is integrated with any numeral.
His first experiences with grids had been made in 1952. From 1958, 0-9 features the 10 numerals as a grid of 2 rows and 5 columns in the normal sequence.
In 1964 he was commissioned for a monumental grid of numbers for the use of the lobby of the theater of the Lincoln Center in Manhattan. This work titled Numbers is made of separate painted metal panels of one numeral each, bolted together for an overall size of 275 x 213 cm. Sequences of numerals are a path to infinity when considering that they can build unlimited numbers. A footprint of Merce Cunningham superseded a numeral toward the upper right corner of that original.
Johns's project to complement the Lincoln Numbers by a bronze failed in 1968. An aluminum variant of Numbers, 146 x 110 cm in gray, was cast in the same year. It displays a grid of 11 rows and 11 columns in the normal sequence 0-9 of the numerals so that each next row or column begins with the next numeral. The stenciled numerals had been taken from a commercially available set.
The artist kept the aluminum Numbers until he sold it to Paul G. Allen in 2001. From that collection, it was sold for $ 17.6M by Christie's on November 9, 2022, lot 49.
Johns acted as artistic advisor to Cunningham’s dance company from 1967 to 1980,
Johns resumed in 2008 the project of number sequences in bronze, aluminum, silver, and copper. 0-9 with Merce's Footprint is a bronze 49 x 94 x 1.9 cm , cast in 2009 in an edition of 3 in different patinas. Cunningham's footprint is a new version. It does not have a separate block but is integrated with any numeral.
later Flags
1983 flag on silk flag
2014 SOLD for $ 36M by Sotheby's
On November 11, 2014, Sotheby's sold for $ 36M from a lower estimate of $ 15M a small Flag 30 x 45 cm by Jasper Johns, lot 9.
Painted in 1983, it is a rare example of encaustic painting on an actual silk flag mounted on canvas. Its regular configuration in 6 rows of 8 stars was obsolete since 1959, confirming that the process of Johns is much more artistic than patriotic.
Painted in 1983, it is a rare example of encaustic painting on an actual silk flag mounted on canvas. Its regular configuration in 6 rows of 8 stars was obsolete since 1959, confirming that the process of Johns is much more artistic than patriotic.
1986 double flag
2023 SOLD for $ 41M by Sotheby's
A Double flag painted in oil and encaustic wax on canvas 65 x 84 cm by Jasper Johns in 1986 was sold for $ 41M by Sotheby's on November 8, 2023, lot 6 in the sale of the Fisher Landau collection.
The two flags are side by side and rotated to vertical in this picture. They are identical and parallel in a reverted position of the star block, with the 50 stars of the current US flag in application since 1960.
As usual in this series, the brushstrokes are left in the rough for inviting to a re-interpretation of the basic meaning of art and creation. Traces of orange, green and yellow are added to the official red, blue and white of a pristine US flag.
In a nearly lifelong obsession with his breakthrough image, Johns painted his 26th and last Flag opus on canvas in 2014.
The two flags are side by side and rotated to vertical in this picture. They are identical and parallel in a reverted position of the star block, with the 50 stars of the current US flag in application since 1960.
As usual in this series, the brushstrokes are left in the rough for inviting to a re-interpretation of the basic meaning of art and creation. Traces of orange, green and yellow are added to the official red, blue and white of a pristine US flag.
In a nearly lifelong obsession with his breakthrough image, Johns painted his 26th and last Flag opus on canvas in 2014.
1994 gray flag
2018 SOLD for $ 13M by Sotheby's
A Flag painted by Jasper Johns in 1994, 40 years after the master model, appears as a synthesis of his lifelong intuitions.
The colors have been removed. In 1957 in Gray rectangles, the three primary colors had not been canceled below the gray. That work was sold for $ 21M by Christie's in 2018. In art history, such a palimpsest comes between Pollock and Richter.
The readability of the theme had appeared as the trademark of the artist. For the Numerals it had been fully canceled in a full gray 0 to 9 executed in 1961, sold for $ 10.9M by Sotheby's in 2004.
The artist undeniably enjoyed his palette of shimmering hues of gray. In the 1994 Flag all other colors are absent but the stars and stripes remain visible. This acrylic and graphite on canvas 32 x 50 cm was sold for $ 13M by Sotheby's on November 14, 2018, lot 32.
The colors have been removed. In 1957 in Gray rectangles, the three primary colors had not been canceled below the gray. That work was sold for $ 21M by Christie's in 2018. In art history, such a palimpsest comes between Pollock and Richter.
The readability of the theme had appeared as the trademark of the artist. For the Numerals it had been fully canceled in a full gray 0 to 9 executed in 1961, sold for $ 10.9M by Sotheby's in 2004.
The artist undeniably enjoyed his palette of shimmering hues of gray. In the 1994 Flag all other colors are absent but the stars and stripes remain visible. This acrylic and graphite on canvas 32 x 50 cm was sold for $ 13M by Sotheby's on November 14, 2018, lot 32.
