Jasper Johns

American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Jasper Johns is widely regarded as a leading figure of Neo-Dada, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. With compelling and daring pieces of art about 1950s American life, Jasper Johns has left a lasting mark on art history. In his work, Johns blurred the line between fine art and popular culture by incorporating newspaper fragments, found objects, and everyday objects, such as beer cans. As a result, modern art began to reflect the American consumer scene of the mid 20th century, resulting in a plethora of Pop art in the 1960s. Flags of the United States and US-themed works are among his most popular works. Bidsquare offers a broad selection of Jasper Johns's artworks for sale. Our online gallery features a wide selection of works by the artist, including paintings, prints, drawings, multiples, and watercolors.

With his work in seriality, materialism, and appropriation, Jasper Johns enabled Abstract Expressionism to embrace subsequent movements, such as Minimalism, Pop art, and Conceptualism. A series of Jasper Johns’ paintings depicting flags, targets, maps, and numbers are regarded today as important precursors of Pop Art, showing how everyday tropes become masterpieces infused with personal meaning, and interpreted in new ways. The same motif was often explored in more than one medium by Johns so that he could delve into new realms of visual expression for the image. Aside from referencing concrete iconography, Johns drew inspiration from his previous works as part of his iconic American flag paintings.

An artwork that combines a canvas and a sculpture, Target With Four Faces, was created by Jasper Johns in 1955. To bring its objecthood into the foreground, Johns' model's eyes were omitted so audiences had to grapple with the painting's ambiguous relationship with its three-dimensional components. Since 1958, when he first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery, Jasper Johns has been experimenting with images and symbols, developing an enigmatic yet unmistakably Johns' visual vocabulary. A good example of Johns' early style can be seen in the monochrome White Flag of 1955, a large work characterized by lush reticence. In addition to the oil-on-paper version, images of flags in a variety of media preceded the artwork, including versions in red, white, and blue. His canvases began to feature real objects in 1961.

The early 1960s saw him painting flags, numbers, and labels, but his works, like Diver, increasingly featured sweeping brushstrokes and coarser textures. Jasper Johns’ paintings in the 1970s became near-monochromes filled with parallel lines that he termed “crosshatchings.” The series Usuyuki, which means "light snow" in Japanese, was produced by Johns between 1972 and 1983. In the 1980s, his paintings included both figurative and autobiographical elements. Jasper Johns pioneered modernism through his use of figurative painting, overturning the entire hierarchy of the New York art world while remaining true to himself in the spotlight-heavy era. As a result, his influence on visual art has forever changed our perception.

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