A Mega-Star for All the Wrong Reasons : Jasper Johns’ Older Works Break Sales Records as His Newer Ones Go on Exhibit in Philadelphia

NEW YORK — Dirty Sunday rain sheets down outside the window of a characterless Manhattan hotel. The view is blocked by sheer canyons of brown brick pocked with blind windows, guarded by black-skeleton fire escapes. Obese ducts and funnels steam like Baudelaire’s hookah-smoking Ennui. Good-for-nothing afternoon, save the leisure to mull over what’s been happening.

A few chilly evenings ago Jasper Johns’ 1959 painting “False Start” was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $17 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of contemporary art (see article on next page). The previous record-holder was that self-same Jasper Johns who only the night before had become the world heavyweight champion when his 1958 “White Flag” brought $7.4 million.

We are accustomed to champs with short reigns, but not even the great Muhammad Ali ever achieved the crown by knocking out himself (as opposed to knocking himself out).

Johns must appreciate the irony. For three decades he has challenged and changed the image of art by employing obvious imagery to create illusive puzzles. In the late ‘50s, he painted a tall, skinny canvas using a broom for a brush and then laconically hanging it on the picture along with utensils commonly found around the studio--a cup, a set of stretcher bars.

Declaration of War

What could it all mean? Johns--as if sympathetic to the notion we might find the picture too oblique--stenciled its title right into the composition: “Fools House.” Any visually literate citizen should have been able to see the painting as a declaration of war against the world-champion style of the day, Abstract Expressionism. “Fools House” stared at AE’s European-metaphysical belief in the spiritual power of pure brush strokes and said “Bunk.”

Johns painted the American flag flattened like a punch-drunk stumble bum and even artniks were a bit flummoxed. Um, probably means the motif doesn’t matter, just the way you treat it. So Johns was celebrated by the cognoscenti for his painterly “touch,” the feathery application of hard-to-manage encaustic paint technique.

Back then nobody noticed the resemblance between Johns’ flags and the way Old Glory had been KO’d by the McCarthy hearings. Johns predicted the flags irrevocable alteration by Vietnam and the hippie generation who learned Johnsian irreverence. He drained the flag of treacly sentiment and grandiosity, but did so with such prosaic frankness the subversion went largely unremarked. The move was so radical it sparked the entire ‘60s Pop style virtually as a mannerist afterthought. Pop at once celebrated our vernacular comic-strip mentality and predicted its evolution into the stylized caricature seen in the recent presidential campaign.

Through it all Johns continued to pass for an artist’s artist who restricted his remarks to anecdotes from the studio and esoteric Duchampian art-about-art witticisms.

Irony dogs art with the wearisome inevitability of a traveling salesman’s soiled underwear. Real art is not crafted to sell as prestige consumer goods that arrogate status to philistines with too much money. Yet if art didn’t produce marketable products, it would be in the same run-down condition as poetry. The artist cranks out a message of brotherhood for all mankind and it winds up in a vault in Zurich.

It’s probably just class prejudice to wonder how anybody with $17 million could possibly be equipped to understand the nuances of this subtlest of artists, but you can’t escape the eight-digit irony of Johns becoming a public mega-star for all the wrong reasons.

I was in Washington when the news broke, trying to have profound thoughts about Veronese, Michelangelo and Japanese warlords being shown at the National Gallery.

As it happens, the Philadephia Museum of Art is showing a Johns exhibition organized by curator Mark Rosenthal for last summer’s Venice Biennale, where it won the big prize.

It’s no trouble to hop off the Amtrak for a few hours on the way to New York to see exhibitions in Philadelphia. Everybody knows what the Hellenistic Greek-style museum looks like: Sylvester Stallone ran up its steps in the original “Rocky” movie.

The exhibition, on view to Jan. 8, is not large, just 36 works covering Johns since 1974. You try to imagine from the looks of it how he must have reacted to having a work go for 17 million. Well, if the paintings reflect Johns’ present mood, he must feel like a guy who wins the lottery the same day he learns he has AIDS.

Recent works are rueful and agonized reflections on death-classic memento mori compositions enjoining us to dwell upon the vanity of worldly things.

They bristle with skull and crossbones, dismembered body parts and art-historical references to Expressionist agony-art from Mathias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altar to Edvard Munch’s “Between the Clock and the Bed” with asides to Picasso and Van Gogh.

A work like the four-part “The Seasons” is almost too easy to read with its traditional Spring-is-Childhood, Winter-Is-Old-Age comparisons between the times of the year and the ages of man.

A Confession

What is even more surprising is the way Johns--so long the most private of artists in both his personal life and artistic imagery--so clearly casts these works as an autobiographical confession. He recaps his own motifs from flags to numerals to cast body parts in such fashion as to say, “Look, it was me all the time. The flag was my Americanness all stiffly rational and up-tight. The flagstones I painted were not flagstones but camouflage. Look, here I will paint them on the cast of my hand and forearm to show you. The shadow in ‘The Seasons’ is my own illusive self.”

The sense of mortality is especially disturbing from an artist who is only 58. There is a chilling finality about confessional art from someone who has always been so enigmatic. Once the sphinx tells its secret, how can it regain its magic edge of mystery?

Earlier works in Johns’ familiar flagstone and crosshatch motifs are more in the voice of the old aesthete, but they grow visually evermore disturbed. In the flickering, Stygian “Dancers on a Plane,” we detect the stylized staring, paranoid evil eyes that used to appear in Jackson Pollock’s abstractions. Johnsian cool is gone in the jerking Cubist planes of paintings paraphrasing a quilt pattern in “Between the Clock and the Bed.”

With “Perilous Night” of 1982, Johns’ art grows so symbolically literal we begin to hope it is just a brilliant stylistic move to get in line with youthful Neo-Expressionism,not a reflection of Johns’ emotional state or his estimate of a collapsing culture (he’s been right about the culture before).

When he employs a European skull-and-bones sign warning of avalanches, it’s easier to dismiss it as a current cliche than entertain it as either a social prediction or an omen of black personal depression.

Compositions are riddled with images from standard textbooks on perception, images that read two ways at once--a vase that is also two facing profiles, a bunny that is also a chicken, a pretty young girl who becomes an old hag.

Could be a Johnsian ploy about the ambiguity of meaning, but doubling is such a persistent motif in the work it is like a veiled confession of a dual nature in the artist, like the symbols for genitalia that read both male and female.

It’s as likely to stand for universal duality as autobiographic catharsis. After all, there is as much preoccupation with dismemberment as with doubling. It recalls gods and heroes from Osiris to Orpheus who were hacked to pieces by harpies--most often for the sin of hubris. Probably doesn’t mean a thing.

On the other hand, there was that headline in the Washington Post, “Johns’ Marketable Mystique--His Early Work Brings Millions But the Artist’s Vision Is Fading.”