All men are mortal. Jasper Johns spent the first two decades of his career painting philosophical puzzles: wry, poker-faced pictures whose matter-of-fact themes and clotted brushwork cut down the heroic pretenses of Pollock, Rothko and the other leaders of American abstraction. He painted targets, maps and flags just as they were. He pictured the digits 0 through 9 with a majesty once reserved for popes and prelates. He affixed his canvases with forks and spoons, rulers and hinges, a broom or even a chair. Goodbye to self-expression; what you see is what you get.
Then, in 1972 — more than half a life ago — this saturnine riddler of American painting pulled some old canvases out of his studio, attached an additional panel to one side, and applied a new kind of markmaking. He covered the canvas with a syncopated array of lines. The hatch marks were parallel, orderly, though they coalesced into a pattern that was fraught and fidgety. They were as literal as the targets and flags, yet properly abstract in a fashion Johns had not painted before. And they would serve, for a whole decade, as just about his only compositional technique.
These “crosshatched” abstractions, as they are known, confounded critics and fellow artists — is this the same guy who painted the Stars and Stripes? — when Johns debuted them 50 years ago, at Castelli Gallery in 1976. Now Gagosian, in partnership with Castelli, is devoting the last show at its Madison Avenue location (Michael Bloomberg’s moving in) to these turning-point pictures, with an ample and very affecting display of 15 paintings and about as many drawings. Spanning two floors, this exhibition includes examples from every major series of Johns’s crosshatched phase, and culminates with an extraordinary assembly of his three greatest and saddest abstract works, each titled “Between the Clock and the Bed” (1981-83) and each lent by a major museum. (Many other works here are on loan from Johns’s own collection.)
Johns is now 95. All men are mortal, Jasper Johns is a man, yet I still won’t call this a valedictory exhibition — his last New York show, at Matthew Marks Gallery two years ago, included several stunning new drawings. These crosshatched paintings are shot through, no escaping it, with melancholy, world-weariness, and the fleetingness of life. They are, also, desolately beautiful. Their jagged, layered, ricky-tick lines appear almost incandescently fresh after 50 years. This show is a map (to use a Johnsian metaphor) of the artist’s earthly path, along a mortal coil from anxiety to acceptance; a map, too, of what new vistas opened for him when he looked death in the face.
The earliest hatched abstraction here, “Corpse and Mirror” (1974), is a diptych with a not-quite-mirror-image structure — a frequent compositional model for Johns, borrowed from Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-23). There are strongly delineated hatches on the left panel, and reflected hatches on the right that are sparer, partially effaced, and gashed by a vigorous crayon X. There’s a cryptic allure to its symmetry: a Rorschach blot, a butterfly’s wings. But the reflections are mismatched in weight as well as appearance; that left panel is done in brisk oil paint, while the right is built up from encaustic, a gluey mixture of pigment and beeswax which Johns first used to petrify the American flag. Which is the corpse in this embalming room, anyway, and which is the mirror?
The marks of “Corpse and Mirror” are black on white, like the hatch marks that artists used for centuries to render lighter and darker tones in drawings. Yet soon, as with his targets and maps, Johns introduced a palette of squeezed-from-the-tube primary colors (red, yellow, blue) or their complements (green, purple, orange). The paint-by-number palette seemed to deny, as usual with Johns, any emotional possibility for abstraction. But something starts happening: with color, the markmaking came alive despite the painter’s reserve.
The critic and art historian Rosalind Krauss, reviewing the 1976 Castelli show in her magazine October, expressed a surprise and uncertainty shared by many of Johns’s early admirers. “They seem devoid of irony,” she wrote of these colorful crosshatches. “These works by Johns seem softened and chastened, their derision silent, their questions over.”
The targets, the maps, the stars and stripes, the digits 0 to 9: such “things the mind already knows,” as Johns once called them, had allowed him to sap painting of its expressive obligations, and ask the biggest questions of perception and metaphysics. The crosshatches produced (literally) a marked change; now, Johns offered allover patterns and designs that were exploratory, vitalistic, and sometimes even voluptuous. What was going on? Had this philosopher at the easel become just another New York abstract painter?
Not quite. What Krauss saw, and what struck me again at Gagosian, is how Johns built these hatched paintings out of the fragments of art history — out of the dead, in other words, rumbling and rattling beneath the staccato strokes. There was Duchamp, of course, and also Picasso, whose ghoulish prostitutes in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) have faces scarred by parallel hatches. At Gagosian, Johns’s red-yellow-blue triptych “Weeping Women” (1975) takes Picasso’s proto-Cubist technique of densely hatched interlocking forms, and rechannels it into scattered, exploded lines. (“Corpse and Mirror,” to go further, has an imprint of a steam iron scalded over its occluded hatches — a call back to Picasso’s “Woman Ironing,” at the Guggenheim, and to Duchamp’s waggish proposal to “use a Rembrandt as an ironing board.”) It wasn’t just Europe that Johns was repainting. Abstract Expressionism was two decades dead by this time, too, and the canvas-spanning hatches also feel like Johns’s belated response to Pollock and the other New York School painters that he admired in his youth but, ever introverted, could never truly imitate.
And then, in 1981, Johns got a postcard in the mail. A friend was in Oslo; he’d seen a painting by Edvard Munch, less famous than “The Scream” but just as perturbed; something in it stood out. A late self-portrait, it depicts Munch as a frail, unsteady senior, shrinking into the back of his bedchamber. Munch’s own paintings, including a long female nude, hang on the wall. Munch penned himself between a grandfather clock, ticking away his last hours, and a bed draped with a quilt rendered with sharp red parallel strokes. The painting had sex, it had death; it had hatches.
Munch’s painting is called “Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed,” and in the early 1980s Johns would devote himself to his three clobbering crosshatched paintings similarly named, each in three parts, each mummified in thick encaustic The hatches of the first “Between the Clock and the Bed,” here from MoMA, are predominantly yellow-blue-red — but now they bristle against a vibrant underpainting of purple-orange-green, and a whole additional system of smaller lines crawls up from the bottom-right corner. A second “Between the Clock and the Bed,” lent from Chicago, incorporates a quotation of white-on-white crosshatches, and collaged headlines from The New York Times about “Falsehoods and Distortions.” In the third, pigmentation has been largely sapped away, though even here, beneath the funereal grays, are lively passages of blue and yellow. Each, alone, pushed his visual language to a new degree of fatalistic grandeur. All together, they are so powerful you might forget where art ends and life begins.
Johns had first encountered Munch’s sun-starved art in a MoMA retrospective in 1950. He’d made prints that echoed Munch’s, and stenciled the initials E.M. on his own works. But the existential angst of the Norwegian painter may have afforded Johns in the early 1980s a new model for creation and invention in the face of mortality or, even, oblivion.
In the spring of 1982, The Times reported on “a serious disorder of the immune system that has been known to doctors for less than a year — a disorder that appears to affect primarily male homosexuals.” Johns would conclude the crosshatched paintings with “Between the Clock and the Bed,” and in that unimaginable first year of the AIDS epidemic, he reintroduced the body into his painterly tool kit, via plaster casts of arms with leprous spots, and half-discernible imagery of a plague victim (drawn from the Isenheim Altarpiece, a masterpiece of the German Renaissance). “Perilous Night,” he called that first one. Thereafter, and to this day, his art has comprised a galaxy of allusions where, even in the shadow of mortality, invention and even hope might bloom.
You only truly live when you become aware you will die — only live, as Heidegger insisted, “when one becomes free for one’s own death,” and so can make authentic choices in your one and only life. The crosshatches may have been a memento mori at first, but they became for Johns something paradoxically life-affirming: a calculated method that opened, in a way he could not foresee, onto a new artistic freedom.
Reassembled here, especially the three paintings called “Between the Clock and the Bed,” they reminded me of something much more important than a painter’s progress. They reminded me (I forget, sometimes) of the clarity art still offers — even when it’s abstract; maybe especially when it’s abstract — about why our brief lives matter.
Jasper Johns: Between the Clock and the Bed Through March 14, Gagosian, 980 Madison Ave., Manhattan; 212-744-2313, gagosian.com.
Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.
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