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Jasper Johns: Lord Graystroke

The Cold War did not do nuance, and Jasper Johns appropriated at least two of its symbols. His breakthrough came in 1954, when he began painting an American flag. He also began the 1960s by mapping the continental United States. I do not even count the overlaid numbers from 0 to 9, like the test patterns on early television-or a countdown to disaster.

Perhaps the Cold War could not accept shades of gray, but Johns has outlived all sorts of provocations and assumptions. Now through May 4, the Metropolitan Museum has the temerity to restrict an exhibition to his work in gray. Nor does the museum intend a quiet study alcove for a postscript to modern painting. “Jasper Johns: Gray” covers fifty years, starting soon after the young artist destroyed all that he had painted and started over. It is also the subject of my latest review, a longer article that has not previously appeared as a capsule on this page. Related past reviews have looked at Johns’s Catenary series, his debt to Picasso, and the parallels to Robert Rauschenberg and his Combine paintings.

Jasper Johns’s Racing Thoughts (photo by Jamie M. Stukenberg/licensed by VGA, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, 1984)The Met dares one to see Johns differently, but also to figure out whether he does look different in monochrome. In the process, it poses again the enigmas that have made Johns so formidable. Probably no one can keep track of them all-image and object, signs and what they signify, copy and original, public symbols and an artist’s private language. If a painter is going to hide in plain sight, it helps to cover seeing in layers of gray.

The text in False Start mostly misnames its dazzling color fields, although not even that pattern is consistent. On the other hand, a word in English always refers to what it names, regardless of its typeface or color. Johns could be insisting on a contradiction or on two kinds of literal fact. He could be announcing the breakdown of art and a loss of words, or he could be asking a viewer to acknowledge meaning as shades of gray. The word GRAY itself turns up, but not the color. Look at the painting long enough, and there it is among the other false starts.

False Start hangs, logically enough, outside the show’s entrance. It also hangs next to Jubilee, which more or less replicates the entire work-in the exact same dimensions and in gray. Jubilee makes perfect sense alone, as a less aggressive but even more beautiful painting, with all the same dilemmas. It also has one matching up fields from painting to painting, extending the puzzle of an exact copy after art or nature. Johns can think in color or in gray, but never in black and white.

When Johns works in gray, image becomes an object, more even than with Three Flags. Work in gray insist on the given, by recycling old themes, just as with Jubilee. However, it also demands attention to detail. Shades of gray just cannot help allowing nuance. One can see why Brice Marden dubbed an encaustic of his own Three Deliberate Grays for Jasper Johns. Among Johns’s other puzzles, one sees only the given, but the more one looks the more one sees.

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