Untitled

Johns began his career in the 1950s using, in his words, "things the mind already knows" as his subjects. The choice of the American flag, targets, maps, or numbers in sequence was a deliberate strategy that allowed him to distance himself from expressionist composition, then so much the dominant mode in painting, at least in New York where he was then living and working. By the 1980s, however, complex and often personal subject matter began to enter his compositions—a tracing of his own shadow against the wall of his studio in St. Martin, French West Indies, for example, or that of the three-year-old son of a friend who visited in the summer of 1986.

Some fifteen years later, when he made the present drawing, he began to reexamine the motifs that populated these earlier paintings and drawings when cleaning out the Caribbean studio, noticing: "things that had been helpful in making earlier works," he said at the time. "They caught my interest and I began to play with them."[1] This drawing includes reprisals of many of the motifs from this important, retrospective period wherein themes of the artist in his workspace—surrounded by elements of his past works—and an exploration of the passage of the time abound.

1. "Jasper Johns: In the Studio. A Conversation with Terry Winters," Jasper Johns: New Sculpture and Works on Paper, New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2011, p. 153.