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JASPER JOHNS
Target with Four Faces (1955)
Encaustic and collage on canvas with plaster casts
75.5cm X 71cm X 9.7cm/29 3/4 in X 26 in X 3 3/4 in

Jasper Johns's work, like that of Robert Rauschenberg (b 1925), played a crucial part in a watershed period of American painting, giving it a new, more objective approach than the then current Abstract Expressionist orthodoxy, which had reached its highpoint with
Jackson Pollock's work.

Bom on 15 May 1930, in Augusta, Georgia, te Johns was brought up in Allendale, South Carolina, by a variety of relatives. His first limited training in art occurred while he was at the University of South Carolina. He settled in New York in 1952 when he began to paint seriously, and devoted himself full-time to art in 1958.

It was in New York that he formed life-long friendships that helped to foster both the appearance and the dominant concerns of his art. Chief among these was that with Robert Rauschenberg, through whom he met the composer John Cage and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. They in-troduced Johns to the idea of an opaque, impersonalized art, and, more particularly, through Rauschenberg's work, to a form of painting that used the bravura brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionists, but drained them of dramatized self-exploration and emotional rhetoric. Rauschenberg was using common objects to enliven his work: 'junk art', was a technique that absorbed Johns increasingly.

Johns's work rapidly acquired its character-istic deadpan nature which overlaid a basic but sustaining creative tension between sar-donic insolence and a more powerful serious-ness. This arose from the issues suggested by his deceptively throwaway attitude: he was reported as suggesting that a painting of his should be accepted as an object, 'the same way you look at a radiator', leaving in the air both the distinction between a work of art and an everyday object, and the role of the observer in approaching a decision on the problem.

Johns began his career working in the en-caustic medium but by 1959 was increasingly using oils, a step which corresponded to a more sustained use of pure color. Previously, his consistent interest (in a busy, well-worked surface texture) had been in paintings of pre-dominantly pure tonality, and it is significant that False Start (1959), his first canvas in bright colors, was matched by the accompanying Jubilee (1959), virtually a grisaille commentary on the former. Apparently abandoning text-ural development, he turned to lithography in 1960; a rare, almost anachronistic medium at the time, but one that, in fact, maintained the concern for surfaces, that of the 'skin' of the lithographic stone. He also turned to sculp-ture: his first sculptures of 1958 were executed in sculp-metal, an easily modeled medium in-tended for the amateur, which he subsequent-ly replaced with papier-mache.

Johns's primary importance has been in providing an alternative to the sterility of decaying Abstract Expressionism. Yet in many ways his work is too personal to supply a sim-ple and sustained stylistic impetus to a new generation. However, his free use of materials and conventional consumer imagery, lettering and everyday objects, proved to be a signifi-cant ingredient in the iconography of Pop Art.

As Johns's career progressed, his additions to the flat picture plane became more complex.
Objects and even furniture fragments were attached to the work and early letters and figures had become separate fixtures some-times hinged on to the background setting.

However, after an extended visit to Hawaii and Japan in 1964, Johns's work relaxed. He used many of his previous images, but in a much freer, more spontaneous way, and added more homely features, such as coffee cups and coat-hangers.

Target with Four Faces is from 1955, a highly productive year, and, as an earlier work, lacks the more sweeping brushwork and dramatically amplified addition of objects that Johns was to develop later. The subject of the target, an example of a favorite visual cliche, he has said, 'seemed to me to occupy a certain kind of relationship to seeing the way we see and to things in the world which we see... have clearly defined areas which could be measured and transferred to canvas.'

The use of encaustic here emphasizes the flatness and banality of the familiar subject while also, on closer examination, revealing (literally) hidden depths, visible layers which help to individualize this particular version.

The encaustic technique involves mixing pig-ment with molten beeswax or resin; at which stage Johns added fragments of newspaper and fabric, applying the mixture and then drying it under a radiant heat, thus fusing the elements together. The immediate advantage was that of speed; the solution dried quickly and another layer could be added. There is, too, a degree of translucency which enables the viewer to see directly the various stages of work and the additional interest of collage ele-ments embedded within the medium. As a glutinous medium encaustic is best applied with the palette knife and this gave Johns the opportunity to produce the heavy impastos which he so enjoys.

The use of plaster casts is an example of another favorite medium of the time: here they are taken from the same model, though carefully rearranged to avoid the impression of a sequence that had been inadvertently produced by the steady relaxation of the model's jaw throughout the casting, thus avoiding the impression of a mouth opening to speak. The wooden structure in which the casts are con-tained, despite its slightly sinister regimentation, provides another sort of the compart- mentalization that Johns frequently employs.

While there are iconographic and formal precedents especially within early American modernism, for Jolins's series of targets, first shown in 1958, the artist has denied any direct influence. This originality is seconded by the incorporation into the work here of colored plaster casts of faces, calculated material additions which dispel 'some of their identity as mere paintings'. Target with Four Faces (1955) was bought by A.H. Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a swift recognition of the reaction against Abstract Expressionism.

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