Next Tuesday being American Independence Day, this week’s picture is Flag, by Jasper Johns, painted in New York between 1954 and 1955. The artist was in his mid-twenties at the time, had very little money and was more or less completely unknown. By day he worked in the Marlboro bookstore on Fifty-seventh Street. By night he painted. One day the art dealer Leo Castelli, intrigued by this exceptionally thin, reticent young man and what little he had seen of his work, arranged to visit Johns in his single walk-up coldwater room on East Eighty-third Street. It was like “seeing the treasures of Tutankhamen”, Castelli later recalled. “I was confronted with that miraculous array of unprecedented images – flags, red, white and blue… large ones, smaller ones; paintings of targets, alphabets. Just an incredible sight … new and out of the blue.” Castelli offered Johns an exhibition, Johns accepted, and American art was never the same again.
Johns’s deadpan pictures of seemingly banal motifs like flags or targets broke decisively with the prevailing ethos of mid-Fifties New York School painting. To the grand, expressive gestures of the Abstract Expressionists Johns opposed his own, “new and out of the blue” art of restraint and self-effacement. His work inspired the first Pop Artists. It also presaged the advent of Minimalism and the consequent apotheosis of the exquisite nearly-nothing-at-all. Johns himself seems to have been almost instantly aware that Flag, 1954-55, the very first picture painted in his new style, represented some kind of breakthrough. When it was finished he destroyed every other work of art he had ever made.
For a long time there was a striking critical consensus about the significance of Flag. By making a picture of something as universally recognised as the Union flag, and by making a picture that...
