Johns, Jasper

Jasper Johns: Gray (Art Institute of Chicago)

Jasper Johns: The Business of the Eye (Taschen Basic Art Series)

Though his work is often categorized as Pop Art for its use of popular iconography and household objects, Jasper Johns can also be described as a Neo-Dadaist. Using wax-based paint, plaster relief, collage, and even commonplace objects such as brooms and rulers in his paintings, Johns achieves a sculptural texture in his work. He is arguably most known for his flag paintings of the 1950s (the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently paid over $20 million for White Flag), though other themes, including targets, numbers, letters, and maps, are also famously recurrent. Johns is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century.
Available in over 20 languages, Taschen's Basic Art series offers budget-minded readers quality books on the greatest artists of all time. The neat, slick format and nice price tag make Basic Art books perfect for collecting.
Every book in the Basic Art series features:
a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
a concise biography

Jasper Johns: A Retrospective

In any survey of the art of the second half of this century, Jasper Johns is a central figure. This comprehensive book is the most authoritative and complete book to date on this important North American artist. This lavish volume contains 483 illustrations, including 261 in full color and four foldouts. Johns's entire oeuvre is arranged in sections corresponding to each era of his career in all media--paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. With its scholarly essays, beautiful color plate reproductions, and extensive bibliography and chronology, this book is sure to become the definitive resource on Jasper Johns.

Jasper Johns's art unites mastery, mystery, simplicity, and contradiction. His methodical working process combines intense deliberation and experimentation, obsessive craft, cycles of revision and repetition, and decisive shifts of direction. Johns also frequently borrows images from other artists, which, ironically, only underscores the originality of his own vision. His work occupies a key position in the art of the second half of the twentieth century. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective is the most complete and authoritative resource on it available, containing 264 color plates illustrating his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Accompanying essays review his essential themes, analyze his references to other artists, and explore how his contemporaries have, in turn, seen and absorbed his own work. The plates are arranged to follow the stages of his career, allowing comparison of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from each period, as his style developed and changed. That comprehensive selection of reproductions is interwoven with an illustrated chronology tracing Johns' life and work with unprecedented accuracy and thoroughness. With its scholarly essays and extensive bibliography, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective is the indispensable reference work on this crucial artist. This volume was originally published to accompany the major exhibition of Johns' work held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1996 and 1997, his first full retrospective in 20 years. It has been out of print since 2002.

A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns

This beautifully illustrated and profoundly original volume of essays by the New York poet and critic John Yau mounts one of the most eloquent defenses of the art and vision of Jasper Johns ever written--going well past tired and traditional Formalist readings of the artist's work to propose a completely new way of reading them: One that is intensely human. Praised by renowned American art historian and critic Jack Flam as, "a brilliantly attentive and original reading of Jasper Johns' work," this volume not only makes many aspects of the artist's work accessible for the first time, but also reveals an emotional tenor to the man whom so many critics have characterized, wrongly, according to Yau, as aloof or hermetic.
Expanding upon the ideas he laid out in The United States of Jasper Johns, published in 1996 by Zoland Books, Yau traces the ways that the artist's work conveys a connection to the common experience--a "sense of life" that encompasses thoughts, memory, consumption, excretion, life, death, time and mortality. Yau's readings of the works are broadened by statements from conversations between the poet and artist that have taken place over the course of the last 30 years. Lending to this sense of intimacy, many of the works collected in this volume come directly from the artist's studio or his private collection, and have rarely been reproduced before. According to Flam, "John Yau focuses his attention on how the artist's pioneering paintings relate to life as it is lived--and on what they tell us about what it means to be mortal and alive in time. Along the way, Yau cuts a much-needed clearing through the tangle of narrowly self-reflexive interpretations that have plagued so much critical writing on Johns' work during the past half century--providing a fresh approach and opening our eyes to Johns' accomplishment in revealing ways. This is a groundbreaking book, written with both precision and passion. It should be read by everyone who cares about modern painting."
John Yau is a poet and critic. He is the author of several books, including The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry, Paradiso Diaspora and Borrowed Love Poems, as well as contributions to monographs and catalogues on Joan Mitchell, Jessica Stockholder, Wifredo Lam and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Since 2004, he has been the Arts Editor of the Brooklyn Rail. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is currently an Associate Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2006-2007.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Testimony: Tell It to the Magistrate!

Help Wanted: MAGISTRATE

Shift work; evening, weekend, and holiday hours required. Serves as judicial officer at various police stations. Apply Room 102, Adult Detention Center.

That's an ad you don't see in the help wanted columns every day. But there it was, alphabetically between laborers and maids. A very curious ad indeed.

John Jasper mulled it over for a while and reread the ad a few more times. He was intrigued, but he was also a little suspicious. In the back of his mind was the thought that there was a scam occurring in room 102. Then again, it was the Adult Detention Center, so it had to be legitimate, didn't it? There was only one sure way to find out. So off he went, seeking room 102.

Such moments change people's lives, and John Jasper's life was forever changed when he became a magistrate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He was taught the job the same way he had learned to swim in summer camp -- they threw him off the dock into deep water. But this time, in addition to deep, it was also strange and mysterious water.

Along the way, he was told that everybody lies, and everybody knows it.

The magistrate's job, he discovered, is to figure out what happened, not who's telling the truth. Since everybody's lying, nobody's telling the truth, so determining what actually happened is what's important.

Join John Jasper in a sometimes exasperating but unfailingly hilarious romp through Virginia's criminal justice system. You'll discover the funniest (and sometimes saddest) "out takes" the magistrate's office has to offer.

Here's a sampling of chapter titles: "He's Deaf, I'm Chinese", "'Y' is for Asian", "Combat Boots and a Mini-skirt", "A Jerk, a Parakeet, and an Iranian", "A Rocket Scientist", "'Z' is for Allute", "DWI -- Too Drunk to Walk", and our personal favorite, "The Finger."

Jasper Johns: Drawings: 1997-2007

Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965

Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves

Cézanne/Pissarro, Johns/Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art

This book presents a comparative study of two pairs of collaborative artists who worked closely with one another. The first pair, Cézanne and Pissarro, contributed to the emergence of modern art. The second pair, Johns and Rauschenberg, contributed to the demise of modern art. In each case, the two artists entered into a rich and challenging artistic exchange and reaped enormous benefits from this interaction. Joachim Pissarro's comparative study suggests that these interactive dialogues were of great significance for each artist as well.

This book presents a comparative study of two pairs of collaborative artists who worked closely with one another. The first pair, Cézanne and Pissarro, contributed to the emergence of modern art. The second pair, Johns and Rauschenberg, contributed to the demise of modern art. In each case, the two artists entered into a rich and challenging artistic exchange and reaped enormous benefits from this interaction. Joachim Pissarro's comparative study suggests that these interactive dialogues were of great significance for each artist.

The United States of Jasper Johns

art, fresh insight into Johns' new paintings