![]() Johns, who never trained as an artist, had an intuitive sense of what made art, art: a way to make the comfortable strange, often with the deftest of nudges. Instead, they’re bleak, obsessive, furtive-seeming a cool critique of the oppressions of the everyday, structures built to contain the uncontainable. His works might have a veneer of the playful - big textbook maps of America smeared with bright swatches of paint, handmade number grids from zero to nine in an array of colors and materials - but they’re not. You’ll know Johns best for his canny and serial use of familiar emblems and symbols: “things the mind already knows,” he once said, a hook slyly set with easy-to-swallow bait. Nose to nose with this constellation of works, it then offers you a choice, though it’s really no choice at all: Left or right, both ways lead to darkness. It’s a broad and restless confrontation of the work of one of the country’s best-known artists - flags and targets, crosshatches and maps, bright color and dun-gray - and among its most inscrutable. NEW YORK - The fifth floor elevators at the Whitney Museum of American Art whisk open to a kaleidoscope of Jasper Johns. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Ill. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. ![]() The Museum of Modern Art, New York gift of Mr. ![]() Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects. Jasper Johns's "Target with Four Faces," from 1955.
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