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Lot Essay
One of the artist’s most recognizable motifs, Jasper Johns’s crosshatched markings sustained his artistic inquiry during an important decade of his career. Alongside his Targets, Flags, and Maps, this aesthetically simple—yet conceptually complex—form allowed him to explore the nature of perception and representation in art. Having spent much of his career examining the strictly formal qualities of familiar objects, with this motif his investigations rose to another level. “Crosshatching was a purer vehicle,” curator John Ravenal wrote, “emptied of every reference except to itself… In short, it was a mark about making marks” (J. Ravenal, “Crosshatching,” in Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation, exh. cat., Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 2016, p.4). As such, the crosshatch becomes the ultimate vehicle with which Johns explored his visual world, resulting in a body of work that has come to be regarded as some of the most advanced in the postwar Western canon.
Johns’s composition is comprised of a series of short staccato marks. Grouped together in bundles of alternating light and dark colors, in themselves they create a field that reverberates with visual energy. Yet, when these clusters of marks are placed alongside other bundles, this sense of tension increases, and by bringing together three panels of seemingly discontinuous bundles the visual tension is racked up exponentially. What might seem to be a sporadic arrangement of colors is in fact a careful consideration of the chromatic qualities of pigment. No marks of the same color are placed side-by-side, and predominantly dark blocks are placed next to majority light passages, leading to the appearance of depth and volume on what is essentially a flat surface.
In this matter, Johns is dealing with the essential elements in rendering volume and depth in drawing that reach back to Renaissance and Baroque masters, such as Rembrandt. Pablo Picasso famously adopted this technique in his 1907 Demoiselles d’Avignon, as well as in his etching Weeping Woman, after which Johns named a celebrated cross-hatching painting from 1975. Paradoxically, Johns uses this schema to foreground the flatness of the picture plane by means of a nearly decorative patterned surface. Yet even as Johns strives for a literal marking out of the surface, his gestures recall the emotive muscularity of the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists, artists whose work lay in oblique relationship to Johns’s own inventive oeuvre.
The origins of Johns's interest in crosshatching can be traced back to a momentary glimpse he experienced during a car journey. “I was riding in a car, going out to the Hamptons for the weekend, when a car came in the opposite direction. It was covered with these marks, but I only saw it for a moment—then it was gone---just a brief glimpse” (J. Johns, quoted by J. Ravenal, ibid.). The key quality of this motif for Johns was that it concealed as much as it revealed, begging more questions than it answers, and he spent much of the 1970s attempting to find the answer. Other parallels have been drawn between Johns’s crosshatching motif and Edvard Munch’s masterpiece Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-43, Munch Museum, Oslo), an artist of whom Johns would have been acutely aware having seen the Danish painter’s first American retrospective that was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
One of the most recognizable names in twentieth-century art history, Jasper Johns has produced an oeuvre that fundamentally questions vision and picture-making. In his engagement with the crosshatch motif, the artist transcended the hard lines dividing abstraction from representation and meaning from its lack. “Patterns, slippage, materiality, time, irreversibility, gravity, helplessness,” wrote poet John Yau, describing Johns’ crosshatch work (J. Yau, A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, New York, 2008, p. 95). It is that rich open-endedness—that poetic opacity—that makes the present work such a compelling example.
Johns’s composition is comprised of a series of short staccato marks. Grouped together in bundles of alternating light and dark colors, in themselves they create a field that reverberates with visual energy. Yet, when these clusters of marks are placed alongside other bundles, this sense of tension increases, and by bringing together three panels of seemingly discontinuous bundles the visual tension is racked up exponentially. What might seem to be a sporadic arrangement of colors is in fact a careful consideration of the chromatic qualities of pigment. No marks of the same color are placed side-by-side, and predominantly dark blocks are placed next to majority light passages, leading to the appearance of depth and volume on what is essentially a flat surface.
In this matter, Johns is dealing with the essential elements in rendering volume and depth in drawing that reach back to Renaissance and Baroque masters, such as Rembrandt. Pablo Picasso famously adopted this technique in his 1907 Demoiselles d’Avignon, as well as in his etching Weeping Woman, after which Johns named a celebrated cross-hatching painting from 1975. Paradoxically, Johns uses this schema to foreground the flatness of the picture plane by means of a nearly decorative patterned surface. Yet even as Johns strives for a literal marking out of the surface, his gestures recall the emotive muscularity of the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists, artists whose work lay in oblique relationship to Johns’s own inventive oeuvre.
The origins of Johns's interest in crosshatching can be traced back to a momentary glimpse he experienced during a car journey. “I was riding in a car, going out to the Hamptons for the weekend, when a car came in the opposite direction. It was covered with these marks, but I only saw it for a moment—then it was gone---just a brief glimpse” (J. Johns, quoted by J. Ravenal, ibid.). The key quality of this motif for Johns was that it concealed as much as it revealed, begging more questions than it answers, and he spent much of the 1970s attempting to find the answer. Other parallels have been drawn between Johns’s crosshatching motif and Edvard Munch’s masterpiece Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-43, Munch Museum, Oslo), an artist of whom Johns would have been acutely aware having seen the Danish painter’s first American retrospective that was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
One of the most recognizable names in twentieth-century art history, Jasper Johns has produced an oeuvre that fundamentally questions vision and picture-making. In his engagement with the crosshatch motif, the artist transcended the hard lines dividing abstraction from representation and meaning from its lack. “Patterns, slippage, materiality, time, irreversibility, gravity, helplessness,” wrote poet John Yau, describing Johns’ crosshatch work (J. Yau, A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, New York, 2008, p. 95). It is that rich open-endedness—that poetic opacity—that makes the present work such a compelling example.