Jasper Johns is an American painter, born in Augusta, Georgia, on 15 May 1930, who made his name with a picture of the American flag. In 1954 he dreamed that he was painting one, and the next morning he began. Flag, and the targets, numbers and maps that followed, made him the painter who, in the critic Holland Cotter's words, "closed the door" on Abstract Expressionism. He is now in his nineties.
People type his name to find one painting and one question: is it a flag, or a painting of a flag? Johns has never settled it. Asked in 1966 to tell the story of how it began, he answered: “Which story? Which one do you know?”
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The story he did tell is short. He dreamed that he had painted a large American flag, and the next morning he got up and bought the materials. Years later the interviewer Alan Solomon pressed him for more, and Johns gave him the whole account in one breath: “That's all I know to that story, that one night I dreamed I painted a flag and I got up and I painted a flag.”
The painting that came out of that morning, begun in 1954 and finished the next year, was wanted by the Museum of Modern Art. Its founding director, Alfred Barr, hoped to buy it from Johns's first solo show. The museum's committee and trustees looked at the most familiar image in America and found it potentially unpatriotic.
The picture they refused to buy is the one visitors now cross the floor to see.
What You'll Discover
Who he lived beside in New York.
Who bought Flag instead.
Why he painted what everyone knows.
What two beer cans started.
Whose photograph he found in 2012.
What collectors paid for one flag.