It has been suggested that the American flag in Johns’ work is an autobiographical reference, because a military hero after whom he was named, Sergeant William Jasper, raised the flag in a brave action during the Revolutionary War. As he explained, the imagery derives from “things the mind already knows,” utterly familiar icons such as flags, targets, stenciled numbers, ale cans, and, slightly later, maps of the U.S. The American flag subject is typical of Johns’ use of quotidian imagery in the mid- to late 1950s. In 1958, Johns painted Three Flags ( Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), in which three canvases are superimposed on one another in what appears to be reverse perspective, projecting toward the viewer. This painting was preceded by a red, white, and blue version, Flag (1954–55 Museum of Modern Art, New York), and followed by numerous drawings and prints of flags in various mediums, including the elegant oil on paper Flag (1957 1999.425). Johns’ early style is perfectly exemplified by the lush reticence of the large monochrome White Flag of 1955 ( 1998.329). This is partly because, while Johns’ painting extended the allover compositional techniques of Abstract Expressionism, his use of these techniques stresses conscious control rather than spontaneity. The new style has usually been understood to be coolly antithetical to the expressionistic gestural abstraction of the previous generation. Johns’ early mature work, of the mid- to late 1950s, invented a new style that helped to engender a number of subsequent art movements, among them Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual Art. 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. He also ranks with Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Munch, and Picasso as one of the greatest printmakers of any era. Together with Rauschenberg and several Abstract Expressionist painters of the previous generation, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, Johns is one of the most significant and influential American painters of the twentieth century. 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. 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. There he saw numerous exhibitions and attended the Parsons School of Design for a semester. 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. He began drawing as a young child, and from the age of five knew he wanted to be an artist. Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina.
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