![]() The words “red,” “yellow,” and “blue” printed partially on left side of the canvas appear as though in a state of erasure, while their colorful pigment counterparts appear (also disrupted) on the right. The surface of the painting is seemingly in the midst of action. The seminal work features a wax cast of Johns’s friend’s leg, two canvas panels, and half of a standard dining table chair. Watchman was made while Jasper Johns was living abroad in Tokyo, Japan, in 1964. ![]() Johns’s own career spans from the flags, through the device motif in the early 1960s, into the crosshatch paintings of the 1970s, and to his complex, densely layered recent works. ![]() Not only did these paintings begin Johns’s successful dismantling of modern art through his ironic analysis of structures and rituals, but they also became the innovative new ground on which a generation of painters and sculptors made their work. The targets and flags, in the words of critic Leo Steinberg, were “co-extensive” with their canvases, existing somewhere between a symbol and a thing in the world. In the paintings, Johns presents images that move into the realm of objects and wrestle with the validity of representation as a philosophical concept. Jasper Johns’s groundbreaking 1958 installation at the Leo Castelli Gallery of his famous target and flag works changed the current of New York painting and had an extraordinary impact on contemporary art. ![]()
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