Jasper Johns: Phaidon Focus

Isabelle Loring Wallace

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is widely accepted as one of the most significant and influential artists to emerge in America in the post-war period. Beginning his career in New York at a time when the modern art scene was dominated by the formidable paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, Johns forged a unique artistic path that echoed the painterly qualities of his contemporaries whilst working with materials and themes in a manner that questioned the very nature of art. Working in a social and artistic environment that included such major avant-garde figures as Robert Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008), the dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham (1919 - 2009), and the composer, John Cage (1912 - 1992), Johns was at the heart of a generation of American artists that helped to shape twentieth-century art, paving the way for many of the major movements - from Pop Art to Conceptualism - that...