City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [100]
I’d always admired Johns. Although the targets and numbers and flags were considered the seminal works behind Pop Art, they didn’t feel like Pop Art to me. First of all, they were too beautifully painted, even juicily painted, to make the flat, strong statement of the sort Warhol or Rosenquist or Tom Wesselmann was making. In fact Johns seemed to have chosen his flags, for instance, not because they were ironic (like Lichtenstein’s comic strips) or iconic (like Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans) but precisely because the flags were exhausted images, so banal (if beautiful) that no one could focus on them for long. Once when Johns was asked to list his favorite contemporary painters, all but one turned out to be an abstract expressionist (with de Kooning heading the list). It seemed no accident that though Johns was considered to have rebelled against abstract expressionism, he dismissed just such claims as mere “sociology.” And he prized the expressionists’ beautiful brushwork.
To be sure, in keeping with his reserved, even guarded personality, he was not a splashy painter nor did his brushwork suggest speed and spontaneity. On the contrary—he’d executed the flags in encaustic (pigment suspended in hot wax), a slow, cumbersome technique that he liked precisely because it inhibited improvisation. Initially he’d painted the flags in enamel, but, as he said, “Although I wanted the strokes to remain separate, the enamel wouldn’t dry fast enough to allow this. But encaustic allowed me to keep my strokes separate but to paint over them very soon after.” Years later, during another interview assignment, he showed me the little electric appliance that heated up the encaustic.
Johns has always recycled his imagery, as if invention were a rude intrusion—or an unwelcome demand on the imagination. Working was not something he did gladly. He remarked to Raynor that he’d “never taken any pleasure in compulsive work,” and “I do what I do without any strong sense of its importance.” He told me that he’d met Samuel Beckett in Paris and mentioned to him that he wanted to illustrate something new. “He looked horrified. ‘A new work?’ he asked me. ‘You mean you want me to write another book?’” This sort of dandified fastidiousness and stylized “laziness” was very much in Johns’s mode. He said that when he looked at a retrospective of his own work, he was distressed by how much work he’d already done. Targets, flags, numbers have reappeared again and again, along with beer cans and flashlights—always the objects that you can’t remember whether you just saw them or not. This repetitiveness, he claimed, also distressed him. “I’ve always thought my work was too much of a piece. One wants one’s mind to be agile and not overly repetitive, yet any painter has unavoidably formed unconscious habits.” He seemed proud of this.
The first time I wrote about Johns I didn’t dare mention even a word about homosexuality. By the time I did an article about the 1996 MOMA retrospective, I thought I didn’t want to alienate Johns altogether by bringing up the subject of his sexuality, but at the same time I didn’t want to appear cowardly by not broaching it at all. I ended up by mentioning a very personal book about Johns and his homosexuality by his old friend Jill Johnston, Jasper Johns: Privileged Information, which was a memoir about their relationship and an effort to decode his work by seeing in it personal and sexual references. Another art critic, Jonathan D. Katz, has worked on the concealed gay content in Johns’s work, certainly against the explicit purpose of Johns. Johns once remarked to Vivian Raynor, who turned it into a title, “I Have Attempted to Develop My Thinking in Such a Way That the Work I’ve Done Is Not Me.” Even Katz admits that after the breakup, “It is as if, without one another, Johns and Rauschenberg have lost the