Jasper Johns (American, born 1930). Untitled. 2013. Watercolor on paper. 22 1/4 × 31″ (56.5 × 78.7 cm). (© Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph: Jerry Thompson (click to enlarge)
Last week, we noted the interview Jasper Johns gave the Financial Times regarding his Regrets, the octogenarian’s latest body of work and title of his forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Among other insufficiencies in that interview, the images that accompanied the Financial Times article were rather small. This has now been partially remedied by the press images released by MoMA a few moments ago — three high-resolution photographs comprising one-tenth of the show’s total number of objects. (And, for a less maddening interlocution with Johns, see his 2007 Proustian questionnaire with Vanity Fair.)
The exhibition, which opens March 15, sees the iconoclastic artist — who once wrote that “artists are the elite of the servant class” — enjoy the curatorial efforts of Christophe Cherix, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, and Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture. With any luck, Regrets will be an emotional corrective of sorts to the unfortunate large-scale theft the artist experienced at the hands of a long-trusted assistant, which came to light this past August.
Jasper Johns (American, born 1930). Regrets. 2013. Oil on canvas. 67 × 96″ (170.2 × 243.8 cm) (© Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph: Jerry Thompson) (click to enlarge)
Jasper Johns (American, born 1930). Regrets. 2013. Charcoal, watercolor, and pastel on paper. 31 1/2 × 46 7/8″ (80 × 119.1 cm) (© Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph: Jerry Thompson) (click to enlarge)
Jasper Johns: Regrets will run from March 15 to September 1 at the Museum of Modern Art (11 W 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan).
Johns was asked https://tinyurl.com/knusc8j What is your current state of mind? to which he answered “Something like very slow panic”. I’m sorry to have to add this macabre observation, but just as the source picture for this series is clear, it is also clear that by using a mirror image of the damaged photo Johns has manifested a clear image of an executioner’s block https://tinyurl.com/mfp6wzm at which point the photo of Freud clearly emerges as an image of a condemned man.