by Jason Farago
After the flags and the targets, after the head-scratching canvases affixed with rulers or silverware, Jasper Johns took a drive out to the Hamptons in 1972 and saw, in the opposite lane of the Long Island Expressway, some kind of crosshatch pattern on a speeding car.
by Josephine Zarkovich
The exhibition Jasper Johns: Crosshatchbegins with Dancers on a Plane (1982), a small graphite drawing densely packed with the artist’s familiar crosshatching: an interlocking pattern of rotating parallel lines.
by Roberta Smith
...Only a few blocks apart, “Jasper Johns: Sculptures and Related Paintings 1957-1970,” at the Craig F. Starr Gallery, and “Ray Johnson’s Art World,” at Richard L. Feigen & Company, form a valuable exchange about the physical processes of making art and how they impart both meaning and mystery.
by John Yau
Currently on view in the exhibition Jasper Johns: Sculptures and Related Paintings 1957–1970 at Craig F. Starr (November 7, 2014–January 23, 2015) is “Book” (1957), a work I suspect many people either don’t know about or are not likely to have seen, even in reproduction.
by John Yau
In 1961, while living on Edisto Beach, off the coast of South Carolina, Jasper Johns bought sheets of plastic from an art and drafting supply store in Charleston. A little while later, he began drawing in ink on the plastic’s smooth, non-absorbent surface...
By Roberta Smith
This lovely, disquieting show is the first to focus exclusively on Jasper Johns’s works in ink on plastic, a combination that he began using in 1962 with velvety, unstable results. Matte, yet slick and nonabsorbing, the plastic turns normally cooperative liquid mediums, like ink or watercolor, recalcitrant. Mr. Johns once said he was attracted to the plastic by its “independence” and the way “it removes itself from my touch.”
by John Yau
...The linking of touch and sight is why the pairing of Johns and Seurat makes sense. And because of that simultaneity, isn’t it time that we stop thinking about his work and its relationship to either the Abstract Expressionists or his peers, and consider what’s there.
by Jim Long
A fortunate exhibition of Jasper Johns flag drawings at Craig F. Starr Gallery presents mostly early drawings, from 1955 and 1956, in a variety of mediums—graphite wash, pencil, ink, collage, watercolor, and some re-worked lithographs—reflecting the artist’s versatility in creating variations on a theme.
