In 1954, Johns, born in Georgia, intermittently art-school trained, after two years’ service in the Korean war destroyed all his work. You need to go back 40 years from Untitled to the work that first put the artist on the map – a phrase more appropriate than usual for a man fascinated by ground plans. President Barack Obama presents artist Jasper Johns with the 2010 Medal of Freedom, February 15, 2011. These are signs and symbols that occur and reoccur throughout Johns’s long and continuing story. The words RED and BLUE are written, backwards in packing-crate stencilled print their lettering is not red and blue, however, but black and grey. On the right of the canvas a ladder leads up, hopefully a mystery figure in the centre is surrounded by the colourful cross-hatching that animates numerous other paintings. In his Untitled (1992-94), the outline of Grünewald’s crumpled soldier, floored by the glory of the risen Christ, floats, turned by 90 degrees, over the floorplan of Johns’s grandfather’s house. Johns, too, fell under its disturbing spell, and images from it are one of the many threads running through this tightly woven and richly textured show. But the event was also important because it was during his stay in Switzerland that Johns popped over the border to Alsace and saw in Colmar for the first time Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, the complex and disturbing polyptych whose influence has resonated through the centuries into the work of Picasso, Otto Dix, Max Ernst and many more. It was a volume of texts in French and English, with 32 plates by Johns, and it is shown in the Royal Academy’s outstanding new exhibition dedicated to the artist: Jasper Johns: “Something Resembling Truth”. On 16 June 1976 the seventh Basel International Art Fair opened, and the American artist Jasper Johns was among those who attended the five-day event, specifically to mark the publication of his book with the writer Samuel Beckett.
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