Lot Essay
From the beginning of Jasper Johns' career, starting with his iconic painting Flag, 1954-55 (Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Johns has explored one of the defining questions of art: what is the relationship between the actual object one paints and the painting that results?
Three of Johns' earliest paintings explore this object/painting relationship. These include Canvas, 1956 (Collection of the Artist), Drawer, 1957 (Collection of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University), and Newspaper, 1957. In each of these works, Johns attaches found objects directly to the canvas and then covers them with expressionistic brushstrokes and carefully placed drips of encaustic paint camouflaging the object in a monochromatic field of gray. Newspaper is both an object in itself and a symbol of the source where Johns' letters and numbers could always be found.
In Newspaper, 1957, Johns has taken a double page of standard daily newspaper and glued it on to a slightly larger canvas where a border then surrounds or frames the newspaper. The actual newspaper and its newsprint are barely visible. Only fragments of the page are discernable, and so the newspaper's true use has been eliminated. It can only be read in a non-linear way, which has nothing to do with getting information about the daily news. The newspaper's identity becomes anonymous, so that it is taken as a generalized "newspaper" rather than any specific one. Roberta Bernstein notes that "The words 'The Advertiser...La. Wednesday' can barely be made out in the upper left corner, but it is impossible to know if this is the newspaper's name or not" (R. Bernstein, Jasper Johns' Paintings and Sculptures 1954-1974, Ann Arbor 1985, p. 37). In her analysis, Bernstein also explains that "Newspaper is an art material as well as an object from the everyday environment. Johns consciously presents it both as an object and as a collage in this painting. Johns has used newspaper collage frequently in his paintings since 1954; he also used fragments of pages from books, but the association of book with collage is not as obvious as newspaper. The source for this double use of the newspaper is the Cubist collages" (ibid., p. 37).
Newspaper was selected and shown in Johns' first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. The simplified composition and palette of Newspaper, combined with its natural affinity to literature predicted a number of pivotal works that would follow, including Grey Rectangles, 1957 (Private collection, St. Louis) and the 4 the News, 1962 (Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf).
Three of Johns' earliest paintings explore this object/painting relationship. These include Canvas, 1956 (Collection of the Artist), Drawer, 1957 (Collection of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University), and Newspaper, 1957. In each of these works, Johns attaches found objects directly to the canvas and then covers them with expressionistic brushstrokes and carefully placed drips of encaustic paint camouflaging the object in a monochromatic field of gray. Newspaper is both an object in itself and a symbol of the source where Johns' letters and numbers could always be found.
In Newspaper, 1957, Johns has taken a double page of standard daily newspaper and glued it on to a slightly larger canvas where a border then surrounds or frames the newspaper. The actual newspaper and its newsprint are barely visible. Only fragments of the page are discernable, and so the newspaper's true use has been eliminated. It can only be read in a non-linear way, which has nothing to do with getting information about the daily news. The newspaper's identity becomes anonymous, so that it is taken as a generalized "newspaper" rather than any specific one. Roberta Bernstein notes that "The words 'The Advertiser...La. Wednesday' can barely be made out in the upper left corner, but it is impossible to know if this is the newspaper's name or not" (R. Bernstein, Jasper Johns' Paintings and Sculptures 1954-1974, Ann Arbor 1985, p. 37). In her analysis, Bernstein also explains that "Newspaper is an art material as well as an object from the everyday environment. Johns consciously presents it both as an object and as a collage in this painting. Johns has used newspaper collage frequently in his paintings since 1954; he also used fragments of pages from books, but the association of book with collage is not as obvious as newspaper. The source for this double use of the newspaper is the Cubist collages" (ibid., p. 37).
Newspaper was selected and shown in Johns' first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. The simplified composition and palette of Newspaper, combined with its natural affinity to literature predicted a number of pivotal works that would follow, including Grey Rectangles, 1957 (Private collection, St. Louis) and the 4 the News, 1962 (Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf).