Jasper Johns

        Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and was raised in Allentown, South Carolina. While growing up he always knew he wanted to become an artist. For college he attended the University of Carolina and Columbia. His art teacher recommended moving to New York to further pursue his career in art. He later moved to New York in 1948, and there he attended Parsons School of Design for a semester. After serving two years in the army during the Korean War, he became friends with artist Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Together they created window displays for Tiffany’s. While doing that Johns and Rauschenberg explored more of the New York art scene. Johns became very interested in the works of Marcel Duchamp, which was based on a series of found objects.
      Johns presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Duchamp. In the mid 1950s Johns focused on bull’s-eye targets, American flags, numerals, and letters as subjects for his artworks. One of his techniques was altering the color of the object. Another technique of his is repeats or multiples of the objects within the same canvas. And sometimes, he would also add body parts to his pieces.
      Some of Jasper Johns most famous works are the Flag, Map, and Three Flags. He worked on Flag from 1954-1955. He recreated the American flag using oil and collage on fabric and mounted it on plywood. Map was made in 1961. It is a map of the United States, but the colors of it are altered to be only red, white, blue, and yellow. He also stenciled on the names of each state and the oceans. He created Three Flags in 1958. It is the American flag but repeated three times inside the canvas. With his artwork, Jasper Johns wants his viewer to see a different meaning in the object that is already know to the mind.


Works Cited:

Art and Culture. Jasper Johns. October 26, 2008.
http://www.artandculture.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ACLive.woa/wa/artist?id=82

PBS. American Masters. October 26, 2008. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/jasper-johns/about-the-painter/54/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. October 26, 2008.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/john/hd_john.htm

Wikipedia. Jasper Johns. October 26, 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Johns