2023-10-05 10:50:26
Home visit to Jasper Johns. Sharon, Conn. Solid citizenship. Very well maintained and not a dent anywhere in the upholstery of the seating area. Wall-filling cabinet systems with plenty of space for vases, decorative plates and the framed and glazed drawings that lean on the shelves on the back walls.
Anyone who cannot imagine the artist in anything other than a chaotic atmosphere must first make a thorough apology for their prejudices. In the creative phase of his 93 years of life, Jasper Johns was never susceptible to the notorious professional nonchalance with which his English colleague Francis Bacon transformed his living and working spaces into a color slaughterhouse.
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You will discover some leaps in John’s work, sudden, surprising steps, experiments too, but never the distortions and radical destructions in which the art of the 20th century has repeatedly presented itself. The painter was always concerned with his own order. And as a collector, who is now being introduced to a stimulating exhibition at the Basel Art Museum, he could not have acted otherwise.
Art in exchange with friends
Maybe “collector” and “collection” aren’t the right terms either. In any case, there seems to be nothing programmatic about the over a hundred works on paper that were selected. And it is proven that no strategy leads from the curious self-caricature of Philip Guston (“Smoking in Bed”) to the bearded suffering head of Odilon Redon (“Tête de martyr”). Jasper Johns has never and does not hunt to fill the walls and wall shelves according to stylistic discipline. What is added is more bycatch from the network of lifelong artist friendships.
Philip Guston, „Smoking in Bed“, 1974
Quelle: The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth/Collection of Jasper Johns
The drawings that he acquired were mostly added by chance, through gifts or exchanges with other artists, Johns once assessed the respectable result – surprised, so to speak, by the coherence and consistency of the sheets that he gathered around him. The appeal of a number of works is not least the undisclosed story that is associated with them. He only revealed the origins of the anonymous boy with the haunting eyes. The drawing from the early 1950s comes from the course of his former art teacher, who had her students draw self-portraits in front of the mirror.
What gives the collection rank and museum quality are the modern classics, all of which must have come together through committed purchasing and exchange decisions. Cézanne alone is represented with a capital group, from which the “Self-Portrait” from 1880 stands out as a magnificent testimony to a scrupulous artistic will that has never experienced itself as anything other than an overwhelming effort.
Jasper Johns Collection: figurative accent
And anyone who is allowed to walk from Degas to Gauguin, from Redon to Matisse, from Picasso to Giacometti in their own apartment can be considered privileged. The artist’s eye notices even more than just the awe-inspiring names from the treasure troves of inexhaustible modernity. The wonderfully shadowy Seurat drawing “Torse de femme” (1884) only gradually reveals its secret when the blurred points of light and shadow slowly mix into certainty and model the nude figure as a two-part being: the upper body in the Profile, the abdomen en face – without any noticeable rotation.
Georges Seurat, „Woman’s Torso“, 1884
Quelle: Collection of Jasper Johns
What quickly becomes apparent in Johns’ selection is the figurative accent. And that obviously has to do with curiosity, inclination, passion, perhaps even longing. Because Johns’ work hardly knows the figure. What fascinated the painter from the 1950s onwards was not the voluminous bodies, not the signs of liveliness, but rather the flat things of the world, the signless objects – flags, targets, maps, numbers, letters, beer cans, value-free appliqués – that fit into a painted background have it added.
The banality of the motifs seems to be completely adapted to the climate of the pop era, but if you look closely, it owes more to a painterly investigation. Flat objects have the advantage that they do not need to be transferred from their physical world into the plan-forming world using drawing or painting tricks. What is flat remains flat, and the drawn or painted flag is just as non-illusionistic a representation of a flag as its template itself is a replica of another, a real, drawn or painted flag.
Drawing as perceiving the perceiving
It may be that Johns’ interest in flat objects stems from inadequacy. He once openly confessed that he was not a good draftsman at all. And when he draws, he rarely draws with a sharp line that cuts things out. The line nervously scans the outlines or attacks the objects in packs, as it were.
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The hatching areas play like a curtain, constantly changing direction, in front of the silhouette of the number 1, and it is impossible to decide whether the curtain is falling or whether it is being pulled away. If drawing is an act of perceiving, then Johns’s drawing can be considered the perceiving of perceiving.
Accordingly, the drawing line stars are also missing from the drawing collection. Without exception, Johns’ favorites avoid the line as the shortest route between two points. And other than groping, searching, in quick, short attempts, none of the artists reach their goal. And what is created on the pages is created from a lot of line sums.
„Untitled (Bather with Sunglasses“ (1984) von Eric Fischl
Quelle: 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich/Collection of Jasper Johns
Should we say: Jasper Johns collected what he didn’t paint? And did he draw like the artists he collected? In any case, the collection fits smoothly into the sensual thoughtfulness of this work. And one by no means misunderstands the abstract works in the collection (Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden and Sol LeWitt) if one attests that the collector has an interest in body language that clearly contrasts with his own work.
Kunstmuseum Basel celebrates the collector Jasper Johns
Across art history – from Füssli’s pathetic scene “Orestes after the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus” to Cézanne’s “Bather” to Willem de Kooning’s hallucinating “Woman with High-Heels Shoes”, it is always violent, sometimes quieter puppet theater the painter himself shied away from. And the only body remains that can be identified in his work are the flat handprints. The hand studies in the collection are all the more significant – from the Bolognese Renaissance painter Bartolomeo Passarotti to Käthe Kollwitz to Picasso and Duchamp.
Touching with your eyes is how Jasper Johns once described Cézanne’s artistic technique and also thought of his own. “Touch”, especially “touch with the eyes” belongs to the category of caution. The sense of touch is a sense of exploration. He perhaps knows the least of all the senses and yet wants to know exactly – and under Jasper John’s guidance he has the best opportunity to touch his eyes.
“Jasper Johns – the artist as collector”until February 4, 2024, Kunstmuseum Basel
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