I Can Read With My Eyes Shut Picture

I desire to tell you how I feel — but something thwarts me.

I want y'all to see who I am — simply not right now. Not entirely. Non directly.

This big, advised culture of ours is full of artists who put it all out at that place. Poets who bare their souls. Songwriters strumming through heartbreak.

And and so there is Jasper Johns. Saturnine, wily, elegant, reserved.

The master of withholding.

Johns is 91 years onetime. Always since the mid-1950s, when he painted an American flag just every bit it was, his pensive and poker-faced art has had a reputation (non entirely unearned) for cocky-containment. For withdrawal.

And in "Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror," the two-role retrospective of his life'southward work currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he is beingness hailed again every bit brilliant …

… merely stoic. A grandmaster of American art, all the grander for his reticence.

I honey his reserve, though I get why some people find his fine art frosty.

Many of his paintings can come up across, at first, equally a airtight excursion of intellectual puzzles.

But I want to testify you lot my favorite Johns painting, 1 that beginning appears as impersonal as whatever other — and which, slowly, delivers a roundhouse of passion and pain.

The title is "In Memory of My Feelings — Frank O'Hara," and Johns painted it in the fall of 1961.

As he oft does, Johns stenciled the title on the margin.

What are facts, and what are feelings? Can you trust either?

Every bit a student, I was taught that Johns was the gravedigger of gestural abstract painting, the artist who put a hat on the macho posturings of postwar New York.

His accomplishment, the textbooks said, was to purge art of its expressiveness, paving the route to Popular and Minimalism.

And this painting of nearly monochrome gray — Johns's favorite, the most ambivalent color — would seem at outset to do that job. In that location is then little hither: not much that invites a close read.

Not so. Beneath that grey are feelings that are irrepressible, uncontainable. And in this one painting, Johns shows how your one petty life tin become art that matters.

Nosotros can offset by looking at what constitutes the greyness field. From a distance, the painting appears to consist of four quadrants.

The zigzag marks here on the correct are quite visible. Rather than cohere into a picture or an abstruse field, the brushstrokes remain brusque and discrete.

A bit like Cézanne's independent blocks of color.

The grays range from a dark, blue-tipped steel to a light, cindery ash. In parts beneath, yous can make out phrases of blood-red, yellowish and orange.

At present here at left, you have the aforementioned M-shape brushstrokes, and some freer dripping, every bit well equally bare, exposed sheet.

But as you go college, the brushstrokes dissipate. The awarding gets thinner. It's equally if a quarter of the painting has been left incomplete, or peradventure effaced.

None of these strokes add up to much of a picture. And neither do they have the sublime immateriality nosotros associate with some of Johns's immediate predecessors.

American painting had changed a lot since the previous decade, when Johns arrived on the scene.

In 1954, 7 years before he painted "In Memory of My Feelings," Johns was a recently discharged soldier living in a loft in Lower Manhattan.

Hither, in a drafty studio on Pearl Street, with only a hot plate for a kitchen, he was making his first real commitments to existence an artist.

He had come up back from Nippon and discovered an art scene in thrall to Abstruse Expressionism. Painters like Barnett Newman were working big, and taking risks.

Marker Rothko and others broke down the distinction between effigy and background, and dissolved the picture into transcendent flatness.

Instead of make clean finishes, they favored big, visible gestures. Artists similar Willem de Kooning saw the canvas, in i critic's phrase, as "an arena in which to human activity."

The art world treated the urgent zips and drips as gestures of liberation …

… and sometimes read Jungian interpretations into the impertinent brushstrokes.

Johns, then in his early 20s, liked what he saw.

He admired the gestures, and the suppression of subject affair.

But he could non take on for himself the brash performative mark-making that Jackson Pollock and others had established as the signature of American artistic ambition.

Temperamentally, he was too reserved to be the action man, though he had an intellectual reservation likewise.

Gestural abstract painting seemed like a dead end to him. American painters had been throwing themselves at the sheet for over a decade. He was looking for something cooler, in more than senses than one.

"I didn't want my work," Johns subsequently said, "to be an exposure of my feelings."

And our Johns painting does seem water ice cold, at first. The gray brushstrokes have little of the activity and personality you see in De Kooning or Pollock.

They experience automatic. Even, in the tiptop-left quarter of the painting, expungeable.

The uncovered canvas at the lesser also kills any sense of abstraction as a transcendent field. This painting advertises that it is a affair.

And Johns doubles down on the painting's anti-pictorial quality by affixing several illusion-cramping objects.

This hinge, for case. I of a pair, which — instead of functioning as hinges — bolt two canvases into a single, apartment painting.

This fork and spoon. A little rusty. They snuggle together at the painting's equator line.

The fork and spoon are tied to a wire, whose other stop hangs from a hook that's been screwed right into the painting.

Below the rusty silverware is the name of the poet Frank O'Hara, Johns'southward friend.

It's as if the stenciled name has to fill up in, as best it tin can, the significant that went lost in this abstract fog.

There are other letters down at the bottom. Partially obscured are the words "A DEAD Human." (Look for the raised letter A, stenciled just to the right of that vertical stroke of black.)

And, just beneath, the artist's own alliterative first initial and last name: "J. JOHNS." As if i'south identity itself could stutter, could hesitate.

It's a signature that, with its double-J indecision, sums up so much of what made the early Johns and so exciting.

His hesitant, yes-but-no stance revealed itself from the first major work of Johns's career, painted in that loft on Pearl Street.

It was a painting of an American flag. Which sounds articulate now. But which, in 1954, was almost heretically unexpected.

The 24-year-former Johns started with enamel paint. And so, out of frustration with the long drying time, he added beeswax to the pigment.

The wax and paint fused into a difficult encaustic: a very old-mode pigment, most familiar from Egyptian funerary portraits.

The brushstrokes appeared to be embalmed beneath the surface, as if painting itself were something deathly.

It had scraps of paper embedded in the waxy pigment, merely no personal secrets to disembalm.

The flag baffled people. It had the matter-of-factness of a Magritte, only none of the subconscious meaning of Surrealism. Information technology was a painterly abstraction that covered the pic plane. Merely it was likewise nothing more than what information technology looked like.

After years of action in New York painting, this swain was reflecting. Philosophical sophistication was delivered with ironic indifference.

Through the late 1950s, Johns painted targets, numbers and other commonplaces with deadpan literalism. But no motif recurred as often as the flag.

… and collaged newsprint visible beneath the encaustic suggested some connection with the existent globe.

And yet the paintings were hard to look at equally paintings, because they were so familiar every bit symbols.

In paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, he wanted to depict what he called "things the mind already knows." They were meant to be recognizable equally themselves.

They were both things and signs, representations and what they represented.

He had aid from another creative person: Robert Rauschenberg. Their lives were intertwined in every sense.

Rauschenberg lived in the studio upstairs from Johns on Pearl Street, and between them they merely had 1 refrigerator.

Rauschenberg, a little older and more established, was likewise approaching art with a matter-of-fact double focus. His Combines, hybrid assemblages of painting and sculpture, were also privileging the earth at hand over the depths of the soul.

Rauschenberg and Johns collaborated on department store window displays to make some money, and helped each other make art, as well.

They were, in the about literal sense, role of each other'south work.

They were each other'southward best critics and near reliable first eyes. "I felt kin to him," Johns would later recall.

In the summer of 1961, the ii young men went to Paris together. They both had exhibitions. They collaborated on a performance.

It was Johns's outset trip to Europe; it must have been wonderful.

By the time they were back from Paris, they'd broken upwardly.

Afterwards that year, at the Leo Castelli gallery, where both artists showed, Johns exhibited 4 paintings in shades of gray.

Some incorporated domestic objects. Their mood was bitter, and so were their titles.

None of these can be said to be nigh Rauschenberg; Johns would never play his cards then openly. But the deadpan tone of the flags and targets had of a sudden grown frostier and more biting.

The 4th one was the least angry, the about bereft.

Expect once more at "In Retentiveness of My Feelings," and the flag-like format is now hard to miss. It'southward as well almost the same size as the kickoff flag painting.

This is the blasted flag, the flag wiped away. Suddenly, with a little biographical assist, the grey takes on the tone of heartbreak, of loss.

The ii canvases, hinged together, the same size but not quite identical, start to feel similar lovers in a tomb.

The nigh invisible words "A DEAD MAN" start to feel similar an alternating signature.

In 1964, John Cage disclosed that he'd seen a note in one of Johns's sketchbooks: "A dead human. Have a skull. Comprehend it with paint. Rub it confronting canvas. Skull against canvas."

Using infrared reflectography, the historian Fred Orton found that, in the superlative-right corner, Johns had initially traced a skull with the aid of a stencil before painting information technology out.

Skull against canvas. Painting every bit mortality — from an artist who was 31 years old.

And yet: Knowing this painting dates to the year of Johns and Rauschenberg'south breakdown hardly furnishes you with a fable. You're however locked out of the creative person'south personality, his inner life. Anyway, venting romantic grief is not the same every bit making a major work of art.

There are no real disclosures in this painting, whatsoever more than in the poker-faced flags. If Abstract Expressionists splattered their inner selves onto the canvass, Johns coagulated his, reduced it, turned information technology in on itself.

Even the fork and spoon, nuzzling together like lovers asleep, are facing inward, non out.

The real primal to "In Memory of My Feelings" is its title …

… which Johns stenciled with the words "OF MY" unfilled. Nigh absent-minded.

Never before had Johns invoked a gimmicky straight. And it was O'Hara who gave him a model for painting his feelings without spilling them out.

These days, O'Hara is grouped in with the poets of the New York School: John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch. But during his life, he was far more prominent in the art world.

He worked at the Museum of Modernistic Fine art, ascent from the front desk to the curatorial department, and wrote on his dejeuner breaks.

(This double portrait of him is by Larry Rivers, and dates to 1955.)

O'Hara's verse could be chatty, could be campy.

He shamelessly name dropped his creative person friends — Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and likewise Johns, affectionately "Jap."

But with "In Retentivity of My Feelings," from 1956, O'Hara found a voice in which discretion could become a kind of disclosure. The masculinity of the New York fine art world could brand room for more than tender, less tortured, feelings.

"My quietness has a homo in it," the poem begins.

There are fiddling Johnsian invocations of "stars" and "numerals."

O'Hara's narrator presents himself to u.s. in a succession of disguises. The verse is dense, melancholy, full of subterfuge.

The disguises are ploys to protect his centre. And by the poem's cease, the narrator is undertaking an emotional purgation.

He is hardening himself past forgetting i lover in a higher place all, whom he misses and then much it feels similar a mortal illness.

Or non quite forgetting. Transforming, more similar.

Turned into art. Equally art lonely — sideways, secretive — dear's memory can be made endurable.

In 1967, a year after O'Hara died in an blow, MoMA published a memorial edition of "In Memory of My Feelings."

Johns did the illustration at the title poem'due south end.

In 1961, Johns discovered that he could best nurse his ain heartbreak as O'Hara had taught him. Not through outright expression, nor through repression — but through sublimation.

In O'Hara's poetry, he institute what he had most needed: a conduit for his feelings to take artistic class.

Disguises, indirections, digressions: He certain isn't laying it bare. But Johns, like O'Hara, was forging a pathway between disclosure and denial, a space to convert feelings into facts.

The greyness appears blank, but its quietness has a man in information technology.

And that quietness is not oppressive, like the closet'south. It is a strategic quietness, with paradoxical power: unbearably sad considering of what it does non say.

Fifty-fifty in all gray, this painting does not limited Johns's feelings; from the title on, information technology elegizes them. O'Hara did and so with his usual excitability. Johns was cooler.

What he could not perform he had learned to mourn.

"In Retention of My Feelings" would subsequently reveal itself to be, both literally and metaphorically, Johns'southward hinge painting.

This was the stop of youth.

In everything that followed, from 1961 to now, the puzzles would be both philosophical and personal, and feelings could be properly the stuff of art.

The symbols that once functioned every bit deadpan "things the mind already knows" could now become carriers of grief.

Each object rupturing the motion-picture show plane at present felt like a memento mori.

The motifs would have on, if just quietly, the weight of self-portraiture.

The crosshatched paintings of the 1970s, more traditionally abstruse than any that came before, still bristled with sexual practice and expiry.

And in the gnarled afterward paintings, as the motifs expanded and the riddles got denser, there is always this aforementioned tension betwixt feelings and facts: betwixt the thing made manifest in paint and objects …

… and the joy or pain they conduct inside them.

He is all the same working, in a culture with less involvement than ever in privacy. In which cocky-exposure is the most widely accepted currency and every creative person or lover has to perform for the apps.

But Johns saw long ago that performing your feelings came with a cost, one he could not pay. And then he found — and offered to us, in an achievement that can get out me speechless with gratitude — another way to exist a public person with a private life.

On my visits to "Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror," I take ordinarily had "In Memory of My Feelings" to myself. Information technology's a little as well small to control a oversupply. It does non shout. It does non gush.

But if you lot go to the Whitney'southward half of the retrospective, spend just a minute longer than usual with the greyness.

Look, in particular, at lower right, in the quadrant of the dead homo. "Looking closely helps," Cage wrote in 1964. "Though the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love."

Look beneath the steely upwardly-and-down strokes, and into the muffled ruby and blue underpainting. Down hither we see grayness for what it really is: the dense indirections of an allegedly aloof principal who has made his feelings into art since 1961.

Not blackness or white but gray; non an empty grayness, but one freighted with colour and life.

Make your absence its own presence. Speak low when you speak love.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/16/arts/design/jasper-johns-memory-of-my-feelings.html

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