Yale Bulletin and Calendar

January 21, 2000

Volume 28, Number 17

Exhibit features new works by Jasper Johns

New works by renowned American artist Jasper Johns will be featured in an exhibit opening Tuesday, Jan. 25, at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Johns created the new works within the last three years. They include seven paintings, two drawings and four prints. Highlighting the Yale display will be the first public showing of "Catenary (Jacob's Ladder)," part of the artist's "Bridge" series of works featuring a hanging arc of string suspended before the painted surfaces.

Double trajectory of meaning

"The form assumed by the string is the direct result of the pull of gravity. ...," writes Richard S. Field, curator of prints and drawings at the art gallery, in the catalogue accompanying the exhibit.

"Aside from defined form and function, Johns's catenary protrudes into the viewer's space, joining viewer and painted surface. As such, his catenary is also an emblem of the double trajectory of meaning: the reciprocity operating between that which the work of art offers its viewers and that which the viewers offer the work of art," he adds.

Field organized the Yale incarnation of the exhibit with Joachim Pissaro, the Seymour H. Knox Jr. Curator of European and Contemporary Art, who also wrote an essay for the catalogue.

Johns, who turns 70 this spring, was born and raised in the South, but settled in New York in 1952 after serving in the army in Japan. While supporting himself by making displays for such stores as Tiffany & Co., Johns completed his "Flag," "Target" and "Number" series of paintings. The artist's first one-man show in 1958 garnered critical acclaim, and he was featured a year later in the "Sixteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During this period, Johns made his first sculptures and began to make lithographs.

'A helpless statement'

Speaking with Field in 1998-99 about his art, Johns said: "I think that most art which begins to make a statement fails to make a statement because the methods used are too schematic or artificial. I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, 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."

Over the years, numerous exhibits of Johns' paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures have been presented in the United States, Europe and Asia. There have been major retrospectives of his work in 1977 and 1996. The artist has received a multitude of arts and cultural awards and honors, among them the grand prize at the 1988 Venice Biennale, the National Medal of the Arts, the Praetnium Imperiale for painting from the Japan Art Association, and election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

"We are honored to show this pivotal body of new work by Jasper Johns," says Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz Director of the museum. "The Yale Art Gallery, with its extraordinary Société Anonyme Collection of modernist art, has a long and scholarly relationship with this artist. We are grateful for the enthusiastic support from the late Sidney Kahn, a 1959 graduate of Yale, whose generosity made the exhibition's presentation at his alma mater possible."

"Jasper Johns: New Paintings and Works on Paper" opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in September, and will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art after it closes at Yale on April 9.

To mark the opening of the exhibit, Field and Pissaro will discuss the artist's works in "Jasper Johns: Paintings of the University" at 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 28 in the McNeil Lecture Hall.

Field and Pissaro will also be among the featured speakers at a symposium titled "Marcel Duchamp/Jasper Johns" on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 25 and 26. Yale history of art professor Thomas Crow will also take part in the symposium, which will include art critics and art historians from across the country.

The Yale University Art Gallery, located at the corner of York and Chapel streets, is open to the public free of charge 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 1-6 p.m. Sunday. There is an entrance for persons using wheelchairs at 201 York St., with an unmetered parking space nearby on York Street. For information on access, call (203) 432-0606; for general information, call (203) 432-0600 or visit the museum's website at www.yale.edu/artgallery.

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