Untitled

Johns came to prominence in the 1950s with paintings of, in his words, "things the mind already knows."[1] His earliest subjects included the American flag, targets, the alphabet, and numbers. Their commonplace nature led them to be identified later as proto-Pop, but their initial adoption suggested a cooler, more distanced and hermetic approach to artmaking after the grand ambitions and emotions associated with the New York School and associated artists, like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Frequently using encaustic, or a laborious and slow method of working with wax to encode each mark, Johns proposed a radically different temporality for his work that was less concerned with immediacy than with deliberation and potentiality. While his motifs changed over the years, adopting various art historical allusions including passages borrowed from, among others, Edvard Munch’s Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–43; Munch Museum, Oslo) and Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16; Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France), the question of time and its passing became his recurrent theme.

In Untitled, a work Johns made at the age of eighty-eight, mortality is the subject matter. Working between paper and plastic, Johns chose supports that hold time differently. One feels the ink pressed and placed like a wrinkle on the former; in the latter, the ink slips and slides like a fugitive memory. The skeleton has an obvious relationship to the memento mori, a trope that typically suggests the inevitability of death, but here assumes different guises: unadorned, wearing a top hat and holding a cane, listing to one side; even jumping rope. Some sheets place the skeleton figure in an open, abstract space; others embed the figure in a clustered one, inhabited by other motifs that have run through Johns’s practice such as the stone wall, the newspaper, the snowman, and the stick figure. Where the artist’s signature is present, it is stencilled. Indecipherable script in one sheet appears like inverted text in a mirror but has no evident correlation to something readable. The multiplicity of figures and methods of presentation in the work suggest not so much the finality of one death, but the small ends we meet every day. The art historian Michael Ann Holly has written beautifully on this late style: "Smiling skeletons, sinister skulls, stick figures, snowmen, dissolving figures—not so much a style as a constellation of elegiac subjects that face us with intransigence and difficulty. Visual valedictions to an art of contradiction: absence and presence, seen and unseen, disenchantment and pleasure, incompleteness and sublimity, melancholy and joy, agitation and silence, death and beauty."[2]

[1] The artist quoted in "His heart belongs to DADA," Time 73, May 4, 1959 (reprinted in Kirk Varnedoe, ed. Jasper Johns, Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, New York, 1996, p. 82).

[2] Michael Ann Holly in Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, Exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021, pp. 278–79.