![]() ![]() To forestall such expounding, he told his biographer, Deborah Solomon: “These are not my ideas. He has lived through musings as far-fetched as comparing his head on a plate to that of St John the Baptist’s on a platter, or tracing his attraction to encaustic (the ancient technique of brushing hot beeswax and pigment on fabric) to his love of cooking and, in particular, to frosting a cake. Who is to judge which works sum up a life? How to place works that relate variously by medium, subject and technique? And for the critic, what more to say of work become blue chip that has marked for seven decades? Johns would rather we don’t try. My idea of a retrospective would be to hang everything. The very effort of gathering signature work from all over the world calls for deep pockets and broad commitment: (kudos to, among many, such fervent supporters as Leonard Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Agnes Gund, Constance Hess Williams and Larry Gagosian). More plausibly, apart from sweeping clean an entire museum, a single venue could not have accommodated the more than 500 works here assembled. The mission statement weighting the Whitney’s to the flags and the maps and Philadelphia’s to the numbers doesn’t hold up since both have stellar examples of each. The other “hmmm” is what distinguishes two shows set up to virtually mirror each other. Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois. ![]() © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. ![]() Sidney Kahn The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund the Sara Roby Foundation and the Painting and Sculpture Committee 84.6. Engel Purchase Fund the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States Purchase Fund The Sondra and Charles Gilman, Jr. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York purchase, with funds from the Burroughs Wellcome Purchase Fund Leo Castelli the Wilfred P. Thereby, however, hangs too long a tale, ranging from MoMA’s “asleep at the wheel” to Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf’s “on the ball”. Indeed, given the quantity of its subsequent holdings, MoMA would seem to be Johns’s alma mater. A train-ride apart that, albeit a short one, is unlikely to bring the same viewers to both, begs the question: “Why was the Whitney not paired with the Museum of Modern Art – a subway hop north? True, the Whitney’s and Philadelphia’s holdings are equally deep, but MoMA was first, in 1958 (after Johns had destroyed all the previous work he could find), with the acquisition by its director, Alfred Barr, of four out-there but seminal paintings from Leo Castelli that only an agile eye would have purchased for a museum. Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the twin peaks exhibitions staged to celebrate Jasper Johns’s 90th birthday but now, due to Covid, feting his 91st (with the happy result that he has produced more art in the interim) have just opened as one at New York’s postmodernist Whitney Museum and Pennsylvania’s traditionalist Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. ![]() The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Gift of Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on wood (3 panels), 41.25 x 60.75 in (104.8 x 154.3 cm). Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror Last of the last, with Baldessari gone, of the great philosopher-artists, Jasper Johns is taking a twinned victory lap around two major museums in a bifurcated retrospective that confirms his place in the pantheon ![]()
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