Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose work is associated with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. He is most well known for his depictions of the American flag.
Born in 1930, he is still painting and lives in a rustic farmhouse with a glass-walled studio in Stony Point, New York.
“One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag,” Johns said of his work, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.”
The materials included three canvases that he mounted on plywood, strips of newspaper, and some encaustic paint – a mixture of pigment and molten wax. The newspaper scraps visible beneath the stripes and 48 stars give this icon historic weight because dates on the newspaper scraps can be seen. The year was 1954.
Flag was exhibited at Johns’ first one-man show at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York in 1958. Flag is now located at MOMA in New York. Since that time, Johns has created more than one hundred flags in various media, sizes, and colors. The American flag is something our minds already know, but how this one was executed changes the representation and makes us want to look closer. As one critic of the time wrote, “Is this a flag or a painting?”
“The painting of a flag is always about a flag, but it is no more about a flag than about a brushstroke, or about the physicality of paint.” – Jasper Johns