Facts about Jasper Johns
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Olympic gold medalist and dancer Merce Cunningham collaborated extensively with Jasper Johns during the 1950s and 1960s, with Johns designing sets and costumes for numerous experimental dance productions.
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Photographed by Leo Castelli in 1958, Johns' painting White Flag became a pivotal work that established him as a leading figure in American Neo-Dada and Post-Abstract Expressionism.
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His 1964 painting Studio II measures 80 by 100 inches and incorporates a drawer that actually opens, inviting viewers to interact with the artwork's physical components.
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Four decades after his debut, Johns received the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 2000, cementing his status as one of America's most influential living artists.
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Johns' 1967 painting Passage earned recognition as a major abstract work that shifted his practice toward looser gestural mark-making and away from the rigid geometric and representational forms of his earlier Flag and Target series.
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Encaustic, a painting technique involving heated wax that Johns adopted in the mid-1950s, became his preferred medium for works like White Flag and allowed him to create thick, textured surfaces impossible with traditional oil paint.
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Johns' 1966 painting According to What features a hinged canvas flap that viewers can physically manipulate, allowing them to alter the artwork's appearance and introducing an interactive dimension to his conceptual practice.
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Jasper Johns' 1972 painting Weeping Women earned him a significant price increase when it sold at auction in 2006 for 11.5 million dollars, reflecting his market ascendance decades after his early Flag sale.
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The Museum of Modern Art paid $900,000 to acquire Johns' 1954 Flag painting in 1958, making it one of the first contemporary American artworks to command such a significant price at that institution.
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A bronze sculpture titled Cast of the model of the core of a casting by Jasper Johns from 1986 won the Golden Nica award at the Vienna International Short Film Festival, demonstrating his experimental work beyond painting.
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Jasper Johns' 1958 painting Target with Four Faces featured a plaster cast of a human face repeated four times above a circular target pattern, establishing his signature technique of combining found objects with geometric forms.
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During the 1960s, Jasper Johns created his series of paintings based on numbers and letters, which challenged viewers' perceptions of how familiar symbols could function as pure visual elements rather than conveyors of meaning.
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In 1954, Jasper Johns created his first Flag painting, which sold for 200 dollars and later became one of the most iconic American artworks of the twentieth century.