Johns, Jasper

Johns, Jasper (1930- ), American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, who has played a leading role in the development of mid-20th-century American art. In 1954 he began painting works in a manner radically different from the Abstract Expressionist style that then dominated American art. His canvases featured such familiar objects as targets, American flags, numbers, and letters of the alphabet. He painted these subjects with objectivity and precision, applying paint very thickly, so that the paintings became objects in themselves rather than two-dimensional representations of recognizable items. This idea of art-as-object became a potent influence on later sculpture as well as painting; Johns often integrated three-dimensional objects into his paintings.

By the end of the 1950s Johns's paintings showed a freer, looser arrangement. In some of them, he attached real objects—such as rulers and compasses—to the canvas. False Start (1959, Scull Collection, New York)—in which he stencilled intentionally incongruous labels over painted objects and patches of colour—is a playful, punning work that was an immediate forerunner of Pop Art. Johns broke new ground again with a four-painting cycle entitled The Seasons, shown in New York in early 1987. In 1988 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale. Between 1992 and 1995 Johns created a pair of monumental untitled canvasses—a synthesis of his previous preoccupations and his new artistic and aesthetic interests.