User talk:AMEEN QUDMANY

JASPER JOHNS- BY AMEEN QUDMANY
JASBER JOHNS His Early Life :

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He began drawing as a young child, and from the age of five knew he wanted to be an artist. Unfortunately, in the place where he grew up there where neither art nor artists , the thing on which Jasper once said , "In the place where I was a child , there where no artists and there were no art ,so I really did not know what that meant .i think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in." (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

For three semesters he attended the University of South Carolina at Columbia, where his art teachers urged him to move to New York, which he did in late 1948. There he saw numerous exhibitions and attended the Parsons School of Design for a semester. After serving two years in the army during the Korean War, stationed in South Carolina and Sendai, Japan, he returned to New York in 1953. He soon became friends with the artist Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925), also a Southerner, and with the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Together with Rauschenberg and several Abstract Expressionist painters of the previous generation, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, Johns is one of most significant and influential American painters of the twentieth century. He also ranks with Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Munch, and Picasso as one of the greatest printmakers of any era. In addition, he makes many drawings—unique works on paper, usually based on a painting he has previously painted—and he has created an unusual body of sculptural objects.

His Early Works :

What made Jasper special from the very first is his intensive use of simple schema such as maps, flags, targets, letters and numbers. He often treated the surface lushly and painterly ; and has been famous for incorporating such media as Encaustic(wax –based paint), and plaster relief in his paintings. Moreover, Johns was expert in presenting opposites ,contradictions, paradoxes ,and ironies, much like Marcel Duchump who was associated with the Dada movement. In addition to this, Johns produced intaglio prints, sculptures, and lithographs with similar motifs. Thus, Johns, from the very beginning, managed to excel in more than one aspect of the art; he managed to create a close relation between painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking ; he was successful in presenting the same idea in totally different techniques ; he properly managed in dealing the color to function as signs that offer a range of possible meanings for each piece of work regardless of the subject it it was there for.

This is why Jasper Johns is widely celebrated as one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era. His work combines intellectual challenge with highly sensual handling of materials. Johns is also regarded as one of the greatest graphic artists of this century, and his lithographs, screen prints, and etchings have been exhibited widely. In the end, one can say that Johns' works did not include a clear subject to the audience and he allowed a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Thus while the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, and in the end it could be said that they simply changed subjects, Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like pure paint--painted surface--could declare itself. This is why for twenty years after Johns painted "Flag," the surface--in Andy Warhol's silk-screens or Robert Irwin's illuminated ambiances--could suffice.

The Secret of Gray Color : Every one of Johns’s major iconic, serialized forms has been, at one stage or another, articulated in gray. The intellectual and emotional significance of this color in his work has changed remarkably since 1955, when he used it initially as a statement of skepticism, quietude, or anticipation. Gray has since evolved in Johns’s work as an agent in a profound examination of the very meaning of color itself. The predominance of gray in his recent Catenary series, which self-consciously summarizes the artist’s career, takes on new meaning in the context of this exhibition’s thesis. Gray will be further considered as a material condition. For Johns it seems the most appropriate hue or tone to present a "conceptual" art as it stimulates vision the least. Gray facilitates the presentation of ideas. Conversely, gray has been, for the artist, a vehicle for thinking about color through its absence. Indeed some of his most expressively rich statements are made in gray. Finally, the exhibition will include a number of major new works, which have never been exhibited before publicly. One Step Ahead : From the mid–1960s to the early 1970s, Johns's work became still more eclectic. He explored altered formats and variable scales and used screen-print, photo reproductions, neon, and metal, among other materials and techniques, to produce some of the largest works of his career. Johns's progress has been punctuated by large paintings that seem to sum up lines of inquiry, but the panoramic Untitled (1972) also served as a point of departure. The picture's leftmost section is covered by a wholly new motif of colored clusters of hatch-marks.

For nearly a decade beginning in 1974, this "cross-hatch" pattern became Johns's exclusive vehicle of expression. Although he is rarely discussed as an abstract painter, these cross-hatch paintings are among Johns's central works and constitute a singular chapter in the history of modern abstract art.( The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Johns's Art And Picasso's Impact in The 1980s : In the early 1980s, Johns incorporated into his work a proliferation of new motifs—three-dimensional objects (including body casts) and literal depictions of planks, faucets, clothing, and ceramics. He started to include "trick" images from perceptual psychology. Johns's first appropriations in this period were the pair of armored pikemen, abstracted from a detail of Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1512–16), who are cryptically outlined at the left of Perilous Night (1982). However, the late 1980s, the art of Pablo Picasso emerged as a powerful presence in Johns's art. The autobiographical traces that had appeared in the early 1980s intensified and extended into memories of early childhood. In the Seasons (1985–86), this period's most ambitious works, Johns assembled artifacts and seasonal symbols to narrate the stages of life and the periods of his career. Johns's "self-portrait" shadow, which recurs in all four of the paintings, was inspired by Picasso's painting The Shadow (1953).

The Advent of 1990s ; One More Change By 1990, when he turned sixty, Johns had become dissatisfied with interpretations of his work that depended heavily on prior knowledge. This had allowed critics to "see" virtually indecipherable motifs. Realizing that knowing often replaces looking, Johns decided to force attention on the transformed, borrowed image, independent of its original source. Among the images based on tracings from an unknown source is one that appears first as the central motif in Green Angel In 1992–95, Johns made a synthesis of his tracings and his new motifs when he conceived a closely related pair of exceptionally large untitled canvases. Here he used elements from Mirror's Edge (1992), the etching The Seasons (1990), and the Grünewald altarpieces, "laid over" the reversed imagery of Untitled (Red, Yellow, Blue) (1984). These grand, summary pieces weave together and reformulate the conundrums of picture-making and the concerns with time, memory, personal history, and art history that have continued to absorb Johns. Conclusion In addition to the huge contribution of Johns in the world of art ; such as inserting external materials to be an integral part of the art process ; and in addition to his pioneering ideas, Johns proved not only to be initiative and creative, but also to be dynamic and brave. He was successful in every change he made, but this does not stick him to one aspect of art ; on the contrary , he kept trying new aspects , knocking new doors. The thing that made him seem as many artists melted in one character; and gave his works a wide range of  diversity to that extent that one can not expect a piece of work to be his from the first view. A final thing is that Johns experienced many social and political changes during his life in America, especially in the war time and after. And this ,as I see it, is seen clearly in his works and the way he dealt with art  as a hobby and as a way of expressing feelings and thoughts

Samples of His Works :