ON THE COVERJasper Johns, Savarin, 1977-81, Lithograph on paper, 50 ¼ x 38 inches

Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. RosenArt © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Prints from the Donna Perret Rosen

and Benjamin M. Rosen Collection

NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART

OCTOBER 23, 2015 – JANUARY 31, 2016

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Jasper Johns: Reversals showcases an exceptional group of prints by

Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930), one of most influential artists of the

our time. Known for his representations of icons of American culture

like flags, targets and maps, Johns is a master printmaker whose work

in print influences all aspects of his art. This exhibition brings together

a choice selection of Johns’ mixed media works from the 1970s through

today to show how the logic of printmaking—its multiple plates, mirror

images, repetitions and reversals—informs Johns’ art across media, from

painting and drawing to relief sculpture and collage. Johns’ multifaceted

investigations into the methods and materials of printmaking inspire him

to reinvent familiar media and forms, and reinterpret customary markers

of American cultural identity. For Johns, stars and stripes—like numbers

and letters—are symbols to be deciphered, decoded and reimagined. His

crosshatched stripes, compounded numbers and fragments of newsprint

and typeface revolutionized 20th century art, and continue to explore the

role of the multiple image in contemporary American art and culture.

FIGURE 2 Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973, Silkscreen on paper, 27 ½ x 35 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. RosenArt © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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FIGURE 3 Jasper Johns, #6 (from ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976, Lithograph on paper, 30 1/8 x 29 ¼ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. RosenArt © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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Johns began experimenting with printmaking in the early 1960s, and

the medium quickly became a generative force at the center of his art-

making. As Johns remarked in 1979, “Just the process of printmaking

allows you to do—not allows you to do things but makes your mind

work in a different way than, say, painting with a brush does…you

find things which are necessary to [the process of] printmaking that

become interesting in themselves [and] become like ideas.”1 Johns’

prior paintings had investigated how we derive meaning from visual

signs, from culturally charged symbols like the American flag to more

seemingly straightforward signs like targets, numbers and letters. Early

prints like Savarin, 1977 –81 (Cover) and Flag I, 1973 (Fig. 2) deepened

and extended this analysis, requiring him to break images and forms

down to their constituent parts, and then reconstruct them across

multiple printings and plates. In his paintings and prints from the 1970s

like #6 (From ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976 (Fig. 3), Johns made crosshatching—

the crossed lines used by printmakers to create light and shadow—into

his central motif, exploring how the abstract shapes and forms used to

compose images might carry their own independent meanings.

FIGURE 4 Katy Martin, Jasper Johns at Simca (#62-6), 1980, Digital print, dimensions variable,Collection of the artist

FIGURE 5 Jasper Johns, Figure 8 (From Black and White Numerals), 1968, Lithograph on paper, 37 x 30 inches, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2004.151, Museum Purchase and Partial Gift of Jean Heid, George Roland, Tina Freeman, Mr. and Mrs. Clemmer and William Cousins, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 6 Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1970, Lead relief, 30 x 23 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 7 Jasper Johns, 0-9 (With Merce’s Footprint), 2009, Bronze, 19 ¼ x 37 ¼ x 1 ¼ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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Johns often relentlessly reorders, reverses and recombines numbers and

letters, upending conventional chronology in order to put familiar forms

like Figure 8, 1970 (Fig. 5) in a new light. The finely wrought surfaces of

mixed media works like 0 through 9, 1970 (Fig. 6), and 0-9 (With Merce’s

Footprint), 2009 (Fig. 7) remove numbers from the calculus of everyday

experience to reflect on their deeper relationship to memory and human

consciousness. As Johns said in 1969, “Numbers…were things people

knew, and did not know, in the sense that everyone had an everyday

relationship to numbers…but never before had they seen them in the

context of a painting. I wanted to make people see something new…

when something is new to us, we treat it as an experience.”2 When

creating numbered prints like Figure 3, 2012 (Fig. 8) and Figure 5, 2013

(Fig. 9), Johns reworks the printing plate in between each printing so

that every successive print—and every encounter with each number—

is a unique experience. Eliciting this more meaningful relationship to

numbers, Johns transforms printmaking from an impersonal process of

duplication into a meditation on the resonance of numbers as recurrent

markers of time and human experience.

FIGURE 9 Jasper Johns, Figure 5, 2013, Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 8 Jasper Johns, Figure 3, 2012Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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In the early 1980s, Johns collaborated with Simca Print Artists in

New York to create a series of ambitious, multi-screen prints titled

“Usuyuki,” a Japanese word meaning “light snow.” In Usuyuki, 1981 (Fig.

10), one of the largest and most complex works from the series, Johns

embeds printed fragments of newspaper text in between each of his

crosshatched strokes, creating a collage-like effect. As in many of Johns’

crosshatched works, each of the three panels are imperfect duplications

of one another. Torn snippets of newspaper headlines appear and recur

in different places throughout each panel, as if to question the veracity

and permanence of mass-produced information. Phrases like “Illusion

of...”, “Excerpt from…”, and “It’s Time for…” are layered alongside obituary

announcements and redolent terms like “Falsehoods and Distortions.”

In an interview for the film Hanafuda/Jasper Johns, Johns said that the

“word [usuyuki] had triggered [his] thinking…about the fleeting quality

of beauty in the world.”3 In Usuyuki, Johns’ fugitive fragments of mass-

produced newsprint call forth the ephemeral quality of the “news,” with

the title “Snow” evoking the blur of contemporary media culture as well

as the cloudy and often inexact nature of human memory.

FIGURE 10 Jasper Johns, Usuyuki, 1981, Screenprint on paper, 29 x 46 ½ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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Johns’ art incorporates an array of enigmatic art historical references,

frequently mining the work of other artists and exploring different

aspects of their work across multiple mediums. As Johns said in 1979,

“I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between

the two: the image and the medium. In a sense, one does the same thing

two ways and can observe differences and samenesses—the stress

the image takes in different media.”4 Johns derived the bold design of

his Bushbaby series from the harlequin patterns Picasso incorporated

into many of his most famous paintings and collages. Johns created

Bushbaby, 2004 (Fig. 11) in ink on plastic, a nonabsorbent material

that makes the resultant drawing appear fluid and unfixed, as if the ink

never quite dried. Johns further investigated the variable and unfixed

nature of visual signs in his intaglio diptych Fragment of a Letter, 2010

(Fig. 12). Based on a letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to Émile Bernard,

Johns printed part of the letter in text on the right, and then translated

that passage into sign language on the left. Constantly adapting and

reworking familiar signs and symbols, Johns conveys the meaning in art

as a thing in a similar state of flux.

FIGURE 11 (LEFT) Jasper Johns, Bushbaby, 2004, Ink on plastic, 34 ¾ x 24 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 12 (ABOVE) Jasper Johns, Fragment of a Letter, 2010, Intaglio on paper, each sheet 44 7/8 x 30 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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In 2012, Johns encountered a tattered 1960s photograph of the painter

Lucien Freud that inspired him to embark on a new body of work entitled

Regrets. Over the ensuing two years, Johns created a series of paintings,

drawings and prints inspired by this photograph’s striking jagged

edges and evocative portrait of a man holding his head in his hands in

despair. Regrets, 2014 (Fig. 14) is part of this larger series, and derives its

abstract form from the rips and folds of this found photograph of Freud.

In this series, Johns subjects the photograph to endless manipulations

and modifications, reversing, mirroring, inverting, etching, coloring

and painting until his work bears little trace of the portrait with which

it began. The title Regrets comes not from Freud’s despairing pose,

but the stamped phrase “Regrets, Jasper Johns” that appears on

many works from the series, taken from a rubber stamp Johns uses to

decline invitations and requests. Like so much of Johns’ work, Regrets

resists being read either as emotional self-portrait or a purely formal

exploration of technique. Regrets embraces the ambiguity between

meaning and form that Johns often conveys as the unanswerable

question at the core of his art. “The final suggestion,” he says, “the final

gesture, the final statement [in a work of art] has to be not a deliberate

statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can’t avoid

saying, not what you set out to say.”5  

—Katie Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

FIGURE 13 (LEFT) Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2014, Lithograph on paper, 15 1⁄8 x 10 7⁄8 x inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 14 (ABOVE) Jasper Johns, Regrets, 2014, Aquatint on chine-collé, 26 ¼ x 34 1⁄8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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ENDNOTES

1  Jasper Johns, “Interview mit Jasper Johns/Interview with Jasper Johns,” in Christian Geelhaar, ed., Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, ex. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel (1979), reprinted Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, Kirk Varndoe ed., compiled by Christel Hollevoet (New York: Museum of Modern Art,1996). p. 209-10.

2  Jasper Johns quoted in Gunna Jespersen, “Mode med Jasper Johns,” Berlingke Tidende (Copenhagen), February 23, 1969, 14. Translated from the Danish by Scott de Francesco; reprinted in Varnedoe and Hollevoet, Jasper Johns: Writings, 134, 136.

3  Jasper Johns, “Interview with Katy Martin,” from Katy Martin, Hanafuda/Jasper Johns (DVD from Super 8mm Film, 1977-81, 35 mins.)

4  Christian Geelhaar, “Interview with Jasper Johns,” in Geelhaar, Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, ex. Cat., Kunstmuseum Basel (1979), 39; reprinted in Varnedoe and Hollevoet, Jasper Johns: Writings, 191.

5  David Sylvester, “Interview with Jasper Johns,” 1965, reprinted Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 160.

BACK COVER Katy Martin, Jasper Johns at Simca (#63-16), 1980, Digital print, dimensions variable, Collection of the artist

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

1Jasper Johns, Figure 8 (From Black and White Numerals), 1968, Lithograph on paper, 37 x 30 inches, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2004.151 Museum Purchase and Partial Gift of Jean Heid, George Roland, Tina Freeman, Mr. and Mrs. Clemmer and William Cousins

2Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1970, Lead relief, 30 x 23 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

3Jasper Johns, Cup 2 Picasso, 1973Lithograph on paper, 15 x 10 ½ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

4Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973Silkscreen on paper, 27 ½ x 35 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen5Jasper Johns, #6 (from ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976, Lithograph on paper, 30 1⁄8 x 29 ¼ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

6Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1977-81Lithograph on paper, 50 ¼ x 38 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

7Katy Martin, Hanafuda/Jasper Johns, 1978-81, DVD from Super 8mm film, 5 minutes, Collection of the Artist

8Jasper Johns, Usuyuki, 1981Screenprint on paper, 29 x 46 ½ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

9Jasper Johns, Bushbaby, 2004Ink on plastic, 34 ¾ x 24 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

10Jasper Johns, 0-9 (With Merce’s Footprint), 2009, Bronze, 19 ¼ x 37 ¼ x 1 ¼ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

11Jasper Johns, Fragment of a Letter, 2010, Intaglio on paper, each sheet 44 7⁄8 x 30 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

12Jasper Johns, Figure 3, 2012Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

13Jasper Johns, Figure 5, 2013Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

14Jasper Johns, Regrets, 2014, Aquatint on chine-collé, 26 ¼ x 34 1⁄8 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

15Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2014, Lithograph on paper, 15 1⁄8 x 10 7⁄8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

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