![]() ![]() Johns’s works operate by encouraging viewers to see this object anew. As such it is familiar to all Americans – an object that is known, yet not seen. The map of North America the artist adopted for this series of paintings and prints was based on the type used in school text-books. Two maps I is a key work by Johns that powerfully encapsulates his conceptual concerns and processes of working. Lithography afforded Johns an entirely new range of options for further manipulating his imagery, enabling him to enact his dictum ‘Take an object. The need to draw the image in reverse onto the stone, to draw a separate stone for each colour as well as the medium’s capacity for the reworking and reuse of stones in different colours and permutations presented the artist with new ways of working. The artist’s enthusiastic embrace of the lithographic medium from 1960 opened up new creative possibilities for his work. His use of well-known symbols such as the flag, target or map – ‘things the mind already knows and things which are seen and not looked at’ – enables him to explore the operation of images as surrogates for the object world, and the interplay of perception and representation. ![]() An artist who is widely read in psychology and philosophy, Johns’s particular interest in the work of Wittgenstein has informed his sustained investigations into the nexus between art, perception and language. This approach brings into focus one of the central concerns of Johns’s practice, namely his interest in the interplay between the object, its representation and the languages of illusion. Johns regularly repeated and reworked his subjects, very often across a range of media, explaining ‘I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two: This was to become one of his signature images which he reworked in a series of paintings between 1961–63 and in two lithographs, executed in 1965–6, Two maps land In 1960 Johns added to his repertoire of subjects the motif of the map of North America. Puzzling critics and viewers alike with their commonplace subject matter and impersonal style, these works signalled the return of figuration in American art which in the previous decade had been dominated by Abstract Expressionism. In his first solo show in New York in 1958, he presented a formidable series of paintings of flags, targets, numbers and alphabets. Other map paintings by Johns employ encaustic in place of oil paint.By the early 1960s Jasper Johns had introduced a new subject matter of mundane, everyday objects into American art. Johns continued to make map paintings through the 1960s, including gray versions in 19, a white map in 1965, and a mural 33 feet (10 m) wide and 15 feet (4.6 m) high for Expo 67 in Montreal. Scull to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Johns considered that he was painting a map, not making a painting of a map. It has been suggested that the painting may be a visual pun, as Johns "deliberately put American painting on the map" in the 1950s. Although the outlines of the states are recognisable, the colors do not always respect state borders, perhaps suggesting the blurring of boundaries and homogenisation of post-war American society, reinforced by the mass-produced effect of the stencilled names. His rough brushwork resembles an Abstract Expressionist style or the late works of Cézanne. He copied the outlines to a large canvas, to which he added bright splashes of red, yellow, and blue, sometimes mixed, with accents of black and white. Johns was attracted to an image that is ubiquitous but "seen and not looked at, not examined", effectively a found object. Johns was inspired by a gift from Robert Rauschenberg of some mimeographed outline maps of US states, of the sort that can be colored in by schoolchildren. The names of the states and ocean areas are stencilled. It represents the overall proportions and shapes of the states of the United States and parts of Mexico and Canada, although executed with a more "energetic application of paint" than found in cartography. Map is a 1961 oil-on-canvas painting by Jasper Johns. ![]()
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