The "emotional and murky" face of the legendary Jasper Johns

BilbaoAt 96 years old, the American Jasper Johns (Augusta, Georgia, 1930) remains one of the most important contemporary artists. He was one of the precursors of pop art, with paintings of United States flags and the bronze sculpture of two beer cans, but he is also remembered for Painting with Two Balls, a mockery of the testosteronic excesses of abstract expressionist artists, such as Pollock, De Kooning, and Rothko. These works are just the tip of the iceberg of Night driver, the major retrospective that the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is dedicating to him until October 12.

"Johns has a reputation for being a cold, hermetic, and calculating artist. That's why he is considered the father of conceptual art – states the exhibition curator, Enrique Juncosa. He was a close friend of Marcel Duchamp and couldn't stand abstract expressionism; he said it had a bombastic and spiritual rhetoric, that it spoke of the sublime and existential void. For him, on the other hand, art only has to do with the interpretation and reception of works."

Juncosa has brought a less obvious vision of Johns to the exhibition, "a more emotional and turbulent side that he has especially when he paints with gray," which the curator wanted to emphasize. "That's why I've included few paintings from the number series, which make him a pop painter. I believe that, unlike Warhol, Johns is a very emotional painter, even if he pretends not to be," says Juncosa. Johns, in fact, even said that he had developed his thinking to be able to say "my work is not me" and thus "not to confuse" his feelings with what he did.

Jasper Johns, who in the United States is considered a living legend, destroyed his works prior to 1954, so the paintings with United States flags are his earliest work. But what did he mean with these flags? Johns denied that they had symbolic meaning. He simply said that he had used them because they are an image that everyone knows. In some exhibited paintings, the flags that can be seen are not quite right, due to details such as misplaced stars. "It plays with the idea that the eye corrects you, that what we know prevails over what we see", explains Juncosa. The extreme case is Flags (1965), where two flags can be seen stacked on a gray background. The top one is represented in green, black, and orange, and has a white dot in the center, while the bottom one has different shades of gray and a black dot. When you look at the first and then the second, the brain unconsciously superimposes a complementary afterimage with red, white, and blue. The only flag to which Johns gave political weight is the green and orange one, and he did so to call for an end to the Vietnam War.

The exhibition, which is sponsored by the BBVA Foundation, includes about 140 works, including sculptures, drawings, prints, an artist's book with texts by Samuel Beckett, and the set design for a production by choreographer Merce Cunningham, based on Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass. The tour is organized chronologically, although the paintings and sculptures are separated from the works on paper. One of the reasons for this separation is Johns's unique way of working. "The drawings are very strange because they are later than the paintings. He makes a painting and then makes drawings, and sometimes prints, which function as new variations", says Juncosa.

Pain for the breakup with Robert Rauschenberg

When Johns returned to New York after spending two years in the Korean War, he made a living creating window displays. He shared a studio with Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he was in a romantic relationship. Johns caught the attention of gallery owner Leo Castelli and became a famous artist after the MoMA in New York bought several of his works.

Rauschenberg, O'Hara and Crane

One of the works Juncosa has selected for the retrospective is the painting of mourning for the breakup with Rauschenberg after seven years together, In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara (1961). O'Hara, who died five years later, was one of the great poets of the New York School and a curator at MoMA. The two parts of this painting are joined by a hinge, and on the left side there is a fork and a spoon hanging from a string. On one end he wrote: "A dead man." "It's a kind of emotional self-portrait," points out Juncosa. When they analyzed the painting with X-rays, it came to light that Johns had painted a skull with two tibias but had covered it with paint, perhaps thinking it was too emotional. Another painting with literary references is a requiem for the poet Hart Crane, who in 1932 had committed suicide by throwing himself into the Gulf of Mexico after trying to have relations with a sailor and being beaten up by the crew. In Johns' painting, the protagonist is Crane's arm, which is sinking.

According to critic Richard Norton, all of Johns' work is allegorical, and only his friends know what each work means. In contrast, the general public has to work harder with his games with pictorial language, art history, and perception with fewer clues. From the 1980s onwards, some of his paintings are full of tracings and reproductions of works by artists such as Picasso, Grünewald, Frida Kahlo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Munch; for example, Summer and Fall, which are part of The Seasons, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Art Biennale, which also draw attention for their autobiographical nature with some reproductions of his own works. In contrast, a more recent painting, Portion (2020), is much more enigmatic: Johns painted the anatomical diagram of a knee drawn by a Cameroonian teenager on top of an astrophysical map of the distribution of galaxies. "At a time when all art is pedagogical or political, or cynical, Johns' art appears as something inevitable, as a matter of life and death," says Juncosa.