At a time when the dominant mode of painting,Abstract Expressionism,emphasized expressive drama through bold brushwork and largely abstract compositions, Johns? paintings of the American flag, ...targets, numbers and the alphabet demonstrated a decided departure from convention.Despite being painted with obvious care, they seemed emotionally reticent, cool and quiet, far from the emotional fireworks then fashionable. ?It all began? with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn?t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets - things the mind already knows.That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I?ve always thought of painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear.Then I decided that looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church. A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.? Unlike most artists? statements in New York during the 1950s, Johns? remarks contained none of the familiar talk of doubt and angst, and his selection of subject matter appeared deliberate, thoughtful, and far removed from emotional attachments and desires.To younger artists his art seemed not so much cold and unfeeling as clear-eyed and honest after the excesses of Abstract Expressionism. Furthermore, in selecting recognizable subjects, Johns seemed to reject prevailing abstract modes of painting, yet his subjects themselves - flags, targets, numbers - each possessed a vital characteristic of classic abstraction, namely, a flatness rendering them all but indistinguishable from the picture plane itself. This books underlines how Johns? work made the polarity between abstraction and representation that had dominated debates about modern art for decades seem suddenly obsolete, opening up other ways of thinking about art?s relation to the world. It also tries to understand why since his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, at the age of twenty-seven, he has remained one of the major artists of the contemporary artistic scene until today.
In the decades preceding the Stonewall riots—in the wake of the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey's controversial report on male sexuality and in the midst of a cold war culture of suspicion and ...paranoia—discussions of homosexuality within the New York art world necessarily circulated via gossip and rumor. Between You and Me explores this informal, everyday talk and how it shaped artists' lives, their work, and its reception. Revealing the "trivial" and "unserious" aspects of the postwar art scene as key to understanding queer subjectivity, Gavin Butt argues for a richer, more expansive concept of historical evidence, one that supplements the verifiable facts of traditional historical narrative with the gossipy fictions of sexual curiosity. Focusing on the period from 1948 to 1963, Butt draws on the accusations and denials of homosexuality that appeared in the popular press, on early homophile publications such as One and the Mattachine Review, and on biographies, autobiographies, and interviews. In a stunning exposition of Larry Rivers's work, he shows how Rivers incorporated gossip into his paintings, just as his friend and lover Frank O'Hara worked it into his poetry. He describes how the stories about Andy Warhol being too "swish" to be taken seriously as an artist changed following his breakthrough success, reconstructing him as an asexual dandy. Butt also speculates on the meanings surrounding a MoMA curator's refusal in 1958 to buy Jasper Johns's Target with Plaster Casts on the grounds that it was too scandalous for the museum to acquire. Between You and Me sheds new light on a pivotal moment in American cultural production as it signals new directions for art history.
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