Decoding Jasper Johns' Target
Offered from the collection of Velma Engels, Denver, Colorado, the striking screenprint Target (1974) by celebrated American artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) exemplifies Johns’ preoccupation with the intersections of abstraction and representational objects and the mechanical and the manmade.
In the work, concentric circles of blue and yellow sit on a field of mostly bright red, the boldness of the red heightened by undertones of green, while a band of the secondary colors of green, orange, and purple span the upper edge of the image. Though a screenprint, printed by Simca Print Artists, New York, the application of color is purposefully painterly, building up layers of pure color in brushstroke-like swipes and complete with surgically applied “accidental” streaks and drips of pigment, as though of wet media applied to a work hanging on a wall.
Heralded for his work in reintroducing representational forms back into abstraction, including series of flags, numbers, and targets beginning in 1954, Johns offers a unique perspective on how the formal properties of creating art can affect the relationship the viewer has with previously overlooked quotidian forms. Johns described in a 1965 interview how he became drawn to such forms:
The target seemed to me to occupy a certain kind of relationship to seeing the way we see and to things in the world which we see, and this is the same kind of relationship that the flag had. We say it comes automatically. Automatically you tend to do this, but you see that there are relationships which can be made and those seem to me the relationships that could be made between two images. They’re both things which are seen and not looked at, not examined, and they both have clearly defined areas which could be measured and transferred to canvas. i
In taking an easily recognized form and decontextualizing it through artistic intervention, the viewer can reexamine the object's formal abstract possibilities. In employing the use of screenprinting to this artistic intervention, Johns was also able to complicate the relationship between the mechanical and the manmade and further invite his audience to reengage with previously familiar elements.
For Johns, “in making a painting, you work with what you see and what you do and the painting seems to me to be primarily concerned with those two things. The physical actions you take to make the painting, and the responses to looking at it.” ii
Typically, the making of targets is a mechanical process. This target, however, takes the imagery associated with a target, repurposed through Johns’ intervention, and then likewise mechanically reproduced through the screenprinting process in order to make a uniform edition. The contrast of Johns’ target with the original mass-produced one is his use of composition and bold color that affects the response to the image, including the perfectly repeatable imperfect drips and ink dabs that provide testament to his intervention.
Thus, this tour-de-force image offers a fascinating study of the abstraction of identifiable symbols and our understanding of them as well as the dichotomy between the hand of the artist and that which is exactly reproduced in this age of commercial reproduction.
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CHICAGO VIEWING: 25 - 26 September
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i Walter Hopps, “An Interview with Jasper Johns,” Artforum, March, 1965, https://www.artforum.com/features/an-interview-with-jasper-johns-211898/.
ii Ibid.
Lot 45 | Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930) | Target, 1974 | Estimate $150,000 – 250,000
Property from the Collection of Velma Engels, Denver, Colorado