Johns thought it a “simple-minded” technique. Johns said his work might properly be considered an abuse of the printmaking medium It was Johns’ first attempt at screenprinting, which they loved. The British Museum’s new addition is a riposte to the delight in bold icons taken by such pop artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. The whole point of his art is to take a simple found image or thing – a target, a map, a beer can, the flag – and remake it in a subtle, elusive way. Trump openly praises his supporters for apparently trying to run Joe Biden’s bus off the road.īut you can’t reduce Johns to any simple “message”. Nixon had mobilised what he called a conservative “silent majority” against the perceived dangers of Vietnam war protests. The cracks and damage to the stars and stripes are, surely, the marks of national shame and fury after this revelation of conspiracy and corruption at the heart of government.įrom our historical moment, the rise and fall of President Richard Nixon looks like a modest dress rehearsal for Trump’s assault on democratic norms. Flags I was created the year after the Watergate affair began. The realm of public life was starting to darken, as it has in our century. It’s a bit blunt, but also true, to say that Johns – as a young gay man in socially conservative 50s America – was finding his own patriotism, his own country.īut by the time he created Flags I, the print now in the British Museum, a lot had changed. That poetry becomes still more haunting in White Flag, from 1955, which strips out the famous colours to leave a pale spectre, like a civil war ghost. Instead of a brash icon, this Flag has become a great American novel or a song on the radio played on the lost highway. What he does is to shift the meaning of patriotism. Johns has shrunken America itself to something on a wall. This unwaveable flag, frozen in wax, full of hints of stories, invites you to stand back, to contemplate it coolly. Johns said simply that he dreamed of the flag so he made a flag. There is a distancing, a questioning, in it. Photograph: Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Why is that?įitting image … Johns at work. It’s never going to be held sacred by conservatives or flaunted by crazed militias. But no one has ever mistaken the work for a simple patriotic banner. Johns made this Flag at the very centre of the 20th century, which has been called The American Century, given the country’s rise and increasing global influence during those 100 years. They don’t add up to any readable narrative but instead imply complexity and mystery. Through the colours, you can make out fragments of newspaper headlines in the collage below. But what does it say about the actual US flag? Everything. It gives Flag a solid feel, more like a sculpture than a painting. Simply called Flag, and owned by New York’s MoMA, it is made of a layer of collage covered with a much thicker piling-up of encaustic paint that produces an enduring, almost rubbery surface. But the breakthrough for this new approach, to art and to life, came when Johns made his first US flag in 1954-55. They all broke with the austere sublimity of abstract expressionism to incorporate real life in their creations – from Rauschenberg mixing photographs, paint and stuffed animals in his Combines, to Twombly spattering enigmatic graffiti on to canvas. In the 1950s he, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly formed both an art movement and a love triangle. He’s reticent about every aspect of his art and life. Johns is not an overtly political artist. But to fully understand this work, you need to follow Johns’ very personal interpretations of the flag over nearly 70 years. What makes Johns’ American flag so perfect for this charged, climactic moment? Well, this is an anxious image of the nation fraying. Who, at the close of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, can now utter that phrase without irony? American Dream? Can those words really apply, given that the arrival of this election has been marked by shops and businesses being boarded up, and with Trump making bizarre remarks challenging the sanctity of the poll, threatening the entire democratic process? Three years ago, the London venue put this image on the posters and catalogue for an exhibition called The American Dream. The British Museum has marked the United States’ big vote by announcing its acquisition of Flags I, the screenprint by Jasper Johns that is said to be worth millions. Could there be a more fitting symbol of America right now? But come closer and you’ll notice how pockmarked and scarred its surface is, full of mysterious holes as if nibbled by cockroaches. From a distance, it looks bold and bright, like the very stars and stripes it is representing, an ideal as much as a flag.
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