Royal Academy of Arts, London
Sep. 23 through Dec. 10, 2017
The Broad, Los Angeles
Feb. 10, 2018 through May 13, 2018
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1967, encaustic and collage on canvas (three panels), 33 1/2 x 56 1/4 in., Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection
Artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930), who rose to prominence with his paintings of flags, targets and other familiar objects, will be the sole subject of a special exhibition at LA's The Broad in early 2018.
Johns’ 60-year career of work will be presented in the most comprehensive survey in the U.S. in two decades. Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ is the first major survey of the artist’s work to be shown in Los Angeles, and will be on view at The Broad Feb. 10, 2018 through May 13, 2018.
A collaboration with the Royal Academy, London, Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ will feature more than 100 of the artist’s most iconic and significant paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, many never before exhibited in Los Angeles. With loans from international public and private collections, including significant works from the Broad collection, the exhibition will trace the evolution of the artist’s six-decade career through a series of thematic chapters.
The exhibition encompasses the full range of Johns’ materials, motifs and techniques—including his unique use of encaustic (heated beeswax) and foundmaterial collage in paintings—and the innovations he has achieved in sculpture and the graphic arts by expanding the possibilities of traditional media.
Johns’ use of accessible images will be thoroughly examined, seen continually transformed through the artist’s engagement with a wide range of human experiences. In a departure from a retrospective approach, Johns’ artistic achievements will be illuminated through the juxtaposition of early and late works throughout the exhibition.
One of the most influential and important living artists to emerge in the 20th century, and one of America’s great living artists, Johns has been seminal to the Broad collection. His work emerged with and has influenced numerous other collection artists represented in depth, including Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Sherrie Levine.
Organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with The Broad, Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ is curated by Edith Devaney, contemporary curator at the Royal Academy, and independent curator Dr. Roberta Bernstein, author of Jasper Johns’ Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Sculpture, who has written and lectured extensively on contemporary artists including Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg. Heyler and Associate Curator Ed Schad are host curators at The Broad.
The exhibition title is taken from a 2006 interview, in which Johns said, “Yet, one hopes for something resembling truth, some sense of life, even of grace, to flicker, at least, in the work.”
At The Broad, Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ will begin with an entire gallery devoted to Johns’ complex treatment of the American flag, arguably his best-known image, deployed famously at the outset of his career in the 1950s as testing ground for a new direction for 20th century art, and for decades afterward, as an enduring, compelling and everevolving subject evoking a variety of social meanings.
The exhibition will reveal the continuities and changes in Johns’ work throughout his career. His use of accessible and familiar motifs established a new vocabulary in painting as early as the 1950s—his treatment of iconography and the appropriation of objects and symbols made the familiar seem unknown through the distinctive, complex textures of his works. Through his groundbreaking paintings and sculptures, Johns charted a radical new course in an art world that had previously been dominated by Abstract Expressionism.
In the 1960s he added devices within his works, including studio objects, imprints and casts of the human figure, while works from the 1970s are dominated by abstract ‘crosshatchings.’ During this time Johns began to explore printmaking and is now one of the most celebrated printmakers today.
His work continued to evolve throughout the 1980s, as he introduced a variety of images that engaged with themes involving memory, sexuality and the contemplation of mortality. From this time, Johns increasingly incorporated tracings and details of works by other artists, such as Matthias Grünewald, Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch.
The works of the 1990s built on the increasing complexity of subject and reference, and by the early 2000s Johns had embarked on the pared down and more conceptual Catenary series which, along with other recent works, shows the rich productivity and vitality of this late phase of his career.
Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ brings together artworks that rarely travel, including significant loans from the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute, Chicago; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition, the artist has generously loaned a number of his works to the exhibition.
Works exclusive to The Broad’s presentation of the exhibition include
Three Flags, 1958 (The Whitney Museum of Art, New York)
and In memory of my feelings, Frank O’Hara, 1995 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago).
Other highlights include
Jasper Johns, Target, 1961. Encaustic and collage on canvas. 167.6 x 167.6 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: © 2017. The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY / Scala, FlorenceFlag, 1958 (private collection);
0 Through 9, 1961 (private collection);
Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963 (The Menil Collection on Loan from the Artist);
Between the Clock and the Bed, 1981 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C);
Ventriloquist, 1983 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston);
Summer, 1985 (Museum of Modern Art, New York);
and Bridge, 1997 (private collection).
Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue featuring writings by the curators Devaney and Bernstein, as well as essays from curator and critic Robert Storr, art historian Hiroko Ikegami and writer Morgan Meis. The contributing authors will discuss Johns’ extensive body of work from viewpoints of literature, contemporary culture and international significance. The exhibition debuts at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from Sep. 23 through Dec. 10, 2017.
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