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Lot Essay
Souvenir I is a drawing inspired by an important, eponymous combine-painting that Jasper Johns has retained in his personal collection. Rendered in graphite and ink on paper five years after the painting was complete, this work demonstrates Johns' unusual practice of producing highly finished drawings based on earlier works. Three further drawings and two lithographs were also created after the initial Souvenir painting. In each case, Johns takes the prototype through a series of metamorphoses, changing the focus and the medium in an intuitive re-evaluation of his initial aesthetic ideas, while maintaining close links to the original. "I'm always interested in the physical form of whatever I'm doing,' Johns has said, 'and often repeat an image in another physical form just to see what happens, what the difference is, to see what it is that connects them and what it is that separates them...The experience of one is related to the experience of the other" (J. John's quoted in R. Castleman, Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p.20).
There are two closely related paintings entitled Souvenir that Johns made on a trip to Tokyo in the summer of 1964. The first version, upon which this drawing is based, has a richly textured, grey encaustic ground. The second version is in oil. Both paintings include a plate featuring a passport style photo of Johns affixed to its surface. On the left side a flashlight points upwards to a rear-view mirror that is angled to reflect light back towards the plate. These paintings belong to a period in which Johns began to introduce more psychological, personal references to his canvases: the idea of reflected light stems from an observation he made at a John Cage performance in San Francisco; the flashlight invokes a sculptural work from 1958; and the souvenir plate--the only recognizable self-portrait Johns has made--presents a poignant token of remembrance. The mirror, too, can be seen as a physical manifestation of the idea of self-reflection. Johns meditates once more on the power of memory in this elegant and energetic drawing. He reminds the viewer of the missing objects by labeling his sketches, while the thick black border suggests a sense of melancholic rumination with its similarity to mourning letters. Souvenir I is a new aide-memoir, one that revives Johns' inceptive, enigmatic painting to pose its own questions about reminiscence, reality and representation.
There are two closely related paintings entitled Souvenir that Johns made on a trip to Tokyo in the summer of 1964. The first version, upon which this drawing is based, has a richly textured, grey encaustic ground. The second version is in oil. Both paintings include a plate featuring a passport style photo of Johns affixed to its surface. On the left side a flashlight points upwards to a rear-view mirror that is angled to reflect light back towards the plate. These paintings belong to a period in which Johns began to introduce more psychological, personal references to his canvases: the idea of reflected light stems from an observation he made at a John Cage performance in San Francisco; the flashlight invokes a sculptural work from 1958; and the souvenir plate--the only recognizable self-portrait Johns has made--presents a poignant token of remembrance. The mirror, too, can be seen as a physical manifestation of the idea of self-reflection. Johns meditates once more on the power of memory in this elegant and energetic drawing. He reminds the viewer of the missing objects by labeling his sketches, while the thick black border suggests a sense of melancholic rumination with its similarity to mourning letters. Souvenir I is a new aide-memoir, one that revives Johns' inceptive, enigmatic painting to pose its own questions about reminiscence, reality and representation.