Date: 02-07-2000
Owning Institution: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     20th Century    

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 did not so much represent as impersonate its subject matter – take it off its stretcher and it might even serve as a real flag, albeit a rather fragile one  – Johns was held to have magically reduced painting to its very essence. Because his subject was so well known, so lacking in surprise or inherent interest of its own, the artist had left his audience with nothing else to concentrate on but paint itself. The surface of Flag is both ravishing (although this is not easily appreciated in reproduction) and unusual, owing to the artist’s experiments with the ancient Greeks’ medium of encaustic, or hot pigmented wax, combined with the more modern technique of collage. The picture is alive with surface incident, dabs and touches of colour and fragments of newsprint. It is the ne plus ultra of art-for-art’s-sake, an American flag planted on the summit of the Western European art tradition.

Or so it was once thought. Over the years the plot has gradually thickened. In the early 1960s Johns let it be known that the idea for Flag had come to him in a dream, which suggests that the motif  may have had some private significance for him. This supposition was strengthened in 1976, when he let slip that he had been named after a martyr of the American Revolution, one Sergeant William Jasper, who died raising an American flag over a fort under British siege. In 1990 the artist added that he had been told this by his own father, who was himself also named after William Jasper. Jill Johnston confirmed this in her unauthorised biography of Johns, Privileged Information. Could it be (as she believed) that in painting Flag Johns was in some obscure way alluding to his patrimony?

In the mid-1990s more layers of potential meaning were uncovered when various writers, dissatisfied by purely formalist interpretations of Flag, began to wonder whether the newsprint embedded in its surface might have some significance. In 1994 the art historian Fred Orton reconstructed several of the texts from which Flag is collaged, revealing that Johns included among other things a recipe for apple sauce, a reference to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Pipe Dream, and a small ad for a vaginal deodorant called “Zonite”. In 1996 the poet James Fenton summed up this new research in a fascinating article about Johns, concluding that Flag was among other things a kind of haphazard picture of life in the United States: a sublime work of art constructed out of “the unsublime quotidian incident”, as he put it, “a gesture of profound amusement.”

I have a lot of respect for James Fenton but I think this makes Johns sound a bit too affectionate towards America, too benign and at home with himself and his world – which I don’t think he was, at all, when he painted Flag. In photographs taken at the time he almost invariably has a haunted, wary expression on his face, which is perhaps hardly surprising considering the circumstances of his life. Abandoned by his parents when he was very young, farmed out to various relatives who seem to have passed him round like a bad penny, Johns had had a generally miserable childhood. In 1954-55, his father was in the very last stages of drinking himself to death (he died just before Johns’s first exhibition at Leo Castelli) while the artist himself was in the middle of a passionate affair with Robert Rauschenberg. Johns may or may not have been distressed by the discovery of his own homosexuality (he has hinted that he did not much like himself during this period of his life) but it certainly would have made him feel like a social outsider. It was the time of the McCarthy purges, when homosexuals were lumped together with Communists as enemies of the state. No one suspected of what the official jargon termed “overt acts of perversion” could hold any kind of state office.

When I look at Flag, I can’t see a witty celebration of the land of the free and the home of the brave. I see something muffled, muzzled, inhibited and I notice that for every small fragment of newsprint that can be made out – for every sign of life – there are countless others that have been drowned out or buried in encaustic. If the picture’s structure is meaningful as well as simply beautiful, and I think it is, it suggests not just the throng of lives that is a nation but also a world full of stifled, censored thoughts and feelings. It strikes me as a deeply expressive analogue, in paint, for an America where “un-American activities” of any kind had to be hidden and veiled. Of course I can’t prove it, but I think that when Jasper Johns painted Flag he was thinking about all that couldn’t be said to the father, and all that couldn’t be owned up to in the fatherland.