Here, the numeral 2, outlined in dark charcoal, blends into the grayish graphite wash, fading in and out of view with a change in perspective.Īcross both locations, the themes Rothkopf and Basualdo have focused on interplay with one another, showing Johns’s diverse yet circumscribed pattern use: maps, flags, targets, numbers, and a smattering of Mona Lisa images and brooms about does it. This section of the show in Philadelphia is more intimate than its related room at the Whitney, with smaller works on paper, including Figure2 from 1963, a graphite wash and charcoal work. Johns here, and in many other works, mirrors a visual approach to everyday objects like maps and workaday symbols like numbers: they cross our visual field, but we don’t focus on them long enough to make out their details - when’s the last time you noticed the font of a numeral? In Philadelphia’s “First Motifs” section, subtitled “Numbers,” the focus is on another recurring subject in Johns’s work. Done in hues of orange, blue, and red, the composition looks like an abstract painting from a distance, gaining more precision the closer you get, only to have the map’s accuracy frustrated by the vigorous, inexact application of paint. “Flags and Maps,” for example, falls under the “First Motifs” section toward the beginning of the Whitney’s exhibition, and contains some of Johns’s most well-known, iconic works: Three Flags (1958), an encaustic on canvas work of three American flags, each on top of the other Flagon Orange Field (1957), an encaustic on canvas painting of an American flag set against an orange backdrop both flank Map (1961), a large (roughly two by three meter) oil painting of a map of the United States with the names of the states, like “Georgia,” where Johns was born in 1930, stenciled in the relevant location on the map.

The works have been placed in ten different thematic sections by the curators, Scott Rothkopf (in New York) and Carlos Basualdo (in Philadelphia), with sub-themes at each museum.

Together, the exhibitions offer viewers an unprecedented opportunity to discover the depths of one artist’s oeuvre -not an easy task given the number of works in these shows - if they make it to both museums. Cumulatively, the shows are composed of more than 550 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, as well as numerous photographs and personal objects-like Johns’s copy of Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box (at the Whitney).

Jasper johns exhibition mind mirror