.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Included in Jasper Johns’s catalogue raisonné as the first of his iconic Maps, this intimately-scaled jewel-like painting chronicles the artist’s pivotal contribution to the momentous shift that took place in the trajectory of twentieth-century art history. Building on his Targets, Flags, and Numbers, with his Maps, Johns continued his separation of the sign from the signified—in the present example dissolving the familiar patchwork of American states in a flurry of gestural brushstrokes. Map is one of just eight paintings Johns completed in the 1960s utilizing this subject matter. The other examples are held in major private and institutional collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Given by the artist to his close friend Robert Rauschenberg, and in whose collection it remained until his death, Map is a both a personal and pivotal summation of the practice of one the most important artists of the post-war period.
Map marks the beginning of what is widely regarded to be one of Johns’s most important and influential groups of paintings. Comprising a printed paper map given to him by Rauschenberg, Johns then overpainted the state boundaries and names in a series of energic brushstrokes in shades of gray. Disrupting the familiar rigidity of the geographical borders in this way prompts questions about how these borders are demarcated: what historical, political, social, economic and geographical factors go into creating the recognizable silhouettes of states we know today? In addition, as in many cases there are often no physical reminders of these boundaries on the landscape itself, how permanent are they anyway? Johns challenges what we know—or what we think we know—opening up a whole litany of deeply conceptual questions.
The artist’s adoption of a gray palette in Map is also interesting, something he did to avoid what he called “the color situation,” saying it “suggested a kind of literal quality that was unmoved or immovable by coloration and thus avoided all the emotional and dramatic quality of color" (quoted in R. Francis, Jasper Johns, New York, 1984, p. 37). Coming of age as part of the generation of Abstract Expressionists who regarded color as paramount—think Mark Rothko’s floating fields of intense reds, or Barnett Newman’s vistas of pure primary colors—Johns’s use of monochrome would have been as conceptually arresting as it was visually striking. This was clearly an idea that he was working through with his Map paintings as he alternated between monochrome and polychrome throughout the series. Beginning with gray in the present work, he made a dramatic switch to color with Map from 1961 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) before turning to a variegated gray and muted color version in 1961-1962. Later Johns returned to predominantly black-and-white with his 1962-1963 version (now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). After this, all of the subsequent Maps were painted in monochrome tones ranging from soft whites to dark grays.
Johns's concerted consideration of his Maps, along with his Flags, during the 1960s has led scholars and critics to discuss the symbolism in his repeated use of these motifs. “When the flags are seen in conjunction with Johns’s recurrent, simultaneous depictions of maps of the United States,” writes Scott Rothkopf, curator of the artist’s recent retrospective organized jointly by the Whitney Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “they inevitably serve as wellsprings for meditations on the nation and its history, present and even future” (“First Motifs,” in C. Basualdo and S. Rothkopf, eds., Mind/Mirror, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2021, p. 58). Yet Johns himself has repeatedly said that none of these motifs were chosen with any political connotation in mind, merely that they are a “thing the mind already knows,” connecting his work to a lived experience, while at the same time allowing him to focus his attention on mark-making, color, and medium (ibid., p. 57).
During his entire career, Johns has been steadfastly interested in issues of representation. By exploring different media and taking his motivation from objects and forms he encountered every day, he became the bridge between the two great movements of twentieth-century American art, that of abstraction and Pop. Yet unlike Rothko and Pollock, or Warhol and Lichtenstein, Johns focused his attention not on the emotional pull of his work, focusing instead on an interrogation of the iconography of his chosen subject. He saw that these cultural motifs—maps, numbers, the alphabet etc.—were so ingrained in our consciousness that their formal beauty had often been overlooked. Thus, perception became Johns’s area of concern—how the viewer consumed and interpreted these forms—and in doing so he rejected the traditionally dogmatic approach of figuration and abstraction. However, rather than abandon them completely, he merged the two, investing the viewer with an active and more vital role in the process. Johns’s Maps, including the present example, formed a pivotal part of his oeuvre, and by closely examining the underlying structure of the very world that supported his practice, Johns gave rise to new inquiries into the nature of art, and at the same time produced some of the most perceptive and celebrated works of our time.
Map marks the beginning of what is widely regarded to be one of Johns’s most important and influential groups of paintings. Comprising a printed paper map given to him by Rauschenberg, Johns then overpainted the state boundaries and names in a series of energic brushstrokes in shades of gray. Disrupting the familiar rigidity of the geographical borders in this way prompts questions about how these borders are demarcated: what historical, political, social, economic and geographical factors go into creating the recognizable silhouettes of states we know today? In addition, as in many cases there are often no physical reminders of these boundaries on the landscape itself, how permanent are they anyway? Johns challenges what we know—or what we think we know—opening up a whole litany of deeply conceptual questions.
The artist’s adoption of a gray palette in Map is also interesting, something he did to avoid what he called “the color situation,” saying it “suggested a kind of literal quality that was unmoved or immovable by coloration and thus avoided all the emotional and dramatic quality of color" (quoted in R. Francis, Jasper Johns, New York, 1984, p. 37). Coming of age as part of the generation of Abstract Expressionists who regarded color as paramount—think Mark Rothko’s floating fields of intense reds, or Barnett Newman’s vistas of pure primary colors—Johns’s use of monochrome would have been as conceptually arresting as it was visually striking. This was clearly an idea that he was working through with his Map paintings as he alternated between monochrome and polychrome throughout the series. Beginning with gray in the present work, he made a dramatic switch to color with Map from 1961 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) before turning to a variegated gray and muted color version in 1961-1962. Later Johns returned to predominantly black-and-white with his 1962-1963 version (now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). After this, all of the subsequent Maps were painted in monochrome tones ranging from soft whites to dark grays.
Johns's concerted consideration of his Maps, along with his Flags, during the 1960s has led scholars and critics to discuss the symbolism in his repeated use of these motifs. “When the flags are seen in conjunction with Johns’s recurrent, simultaneous depictions of maps of the United States,” writes Scott Rothkopf, curator of the artist’s recent retrospective organized jointly by the Whitney Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “they inevitably serve as wellsprings for meditations on the nation and its history, present and even future” (“First Motifs,” in C. Basualdo and S. Rothkopf, eds., Mind/Mirror, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2021, p. 58). Yet Johns himself has repeatedly said that none of these motifs were chosen with any political connotation in mind, merely that they are a “thing the mind already knows,” connecting his work to a lived experience, while at the same time allowing him to focus his attention on mark-making, color, and medium (ibid., p. 57).
During his entire career, Johns has been steadfastly interested in issues of representation. By exploring different media and taking his motivation from objects and forms he encountered every day, he became the bridge between the two great movements of twentieth-century American art, that of abstraction and Pop. Yet unlike Rothko and Pollock, or Warhol and Lichtenstein, Johns focused his attention not on the emotional pull of his work, focusing instead on an interrogation of the iconography of his chosen subject. He saw that these cultural motifs—maps, numbers, the alphabet etc.—were so ingrained in our consciousness that their formal beauty had often been overlooked. Thus, perception became Johns’s area of concern—how the viewer consumed and interpreted these forms—and in doing so he rejected the traditionally dogmatic approach of figuration and abstraction. However, rather than abandon them completely, he merged the two, investing the viewer with an active and more vital role in the process. Johns’s Maps, including the present example, formed a pivotal part of his oeuvre, and by closely examining the underlying structure of the very world that supported his practice, Johns gave rise to new inquiries into the nature of art, and at the same time produced some of the most perceptive and celebrated works of our time.