
Jasper JohnsÉtats-Unis, 1930Peut-on la contempler ?
New York, États-Unis
Présentée au public. Qui s’en porte garant est indiqué ci-dessous.
Flag est une peinture à l'encaustique créé vers 1954 par Jasper Johns.
C'est une peinture à l'encaustique en couleurs inspirée du pop art. Elle exprime "un mélange expressionniste des coups de pinceaux, gestes libres et gestes contraints de la représentation. Le peintre a voulu mettre en avant la lisière entre l’abstrait et l’illustratif. Cette nouvelle génération d’artistes, dont Jasper Johns appartient, ne croit plus à l’autonomie de la peinture mais à la prévalence du geste au détriment de l’acte créateur[réf. souhaitée]."
Elle est actuellement conservée au Museum of Modern Art.
1951–1953
Drafted into the army during the Korean War
In 1951 his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the army during the Korean War. He served for two years, first at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and then in Sendai, Japan.
summer 1953
Meets Robert Rauschenberg
Returning to New York in the summer of 1953, Johns worked at Marboro Books and met Sari Dienes, Rachel Rosenthal and Robert Rauschenberg, five years his senior, with whom he began a romantic and artistic relationship that lasted until 1961. In the same period he was strongly influenced by the choreographer Merce Cunningham and his partner, the composer John Cage.
1954
Destroys his earlier work: flags, targets, numbers
In 1954 Johns destroyed all of his previous artwork still in his possession and began painting flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers, “things the mind already knows”. Unlike the gestural abstraction of the Abstract Expressionists, these paintings could be read as both representational and abstract.