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jasper johns b.1930
Colored Alphabet
Oil, encaustic and paper collage on panel
12 by 10 1/2 in. 30.5 by 26.7 cm.
Painted in 1959.
Provenance: Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC 65); Mr. and Mrs. John Jakobson, Pasadena (sold: Christie's, New York, May 3, 1989, lot 35); Acquired at the above sale
Exhibited: New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Lettering by Hand, 1962-63, no. 23; New York,
The Jewish Museum, Jasper Johns, 1964, no. 38 (titled Alphabet); The Pasadena Art Museum, Jasper Johns, 1965, no. 32
Jasper Johns's early paintings of targets, flags, alphabets and numbers, created between 1954 and 1959, combine paintings and objects, form and gesture, symbol and meaning. They offer a decisive departure from the concerns of Abstract Expressionism. Their stirring visual impact urges toward the intellectual rather than the transcendental, the objective over the sublime. Most poignantly, they provoke a radical reassessment of our habitual attitudes toward perception, knowledge and memory, calling into question the fundamental issues of human experience.
In Colored Alphabet, Johns creates a hermetically sealed progression from A to Z, structurally positioning and evocatively painting the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Here, "Johns has set up the letters so that we can read them the way we were taught, in linear sequence from left to right, but also vertically and diagonally." (Roberta Bernstein, "The Changing Focus of the Eye", Jasper Johns, Paintings and Sculptures 1954-1974, Ann Arbor, 1985, p. 24). While in other Alphabet paintings the canvas contains an almost unending repetition of the letters of the alphabet, beginning at the far upper left of the canvas and continuing to the far bottom right, in Colored Alphabet the twenty-six letters are framed within the picture plane. In such a way, one reads the alphabet as a strong compositional whole, at the same time identifying its individual parts.
The letters of Johns's alphabet - traced in stencil and laid down in broad dripping strokes - are often obscured by overlapping strokes and bursts of pigment. Unlike the earlier monochromatic works, which eliminate the emotional balance of color harmonies, Colored Alphabet abounds in the splendor of its multi-hued palette. The painting's varied surface wavers between sparse and thick, luminous and flat, as its candy-colored hues trickle and cluster in frenzied progression. The thick layering of encaustic, oil and collage creates textural complexities that counteract the ordered structure of the grid.
Johns painted Colored Alphabet in 1959, the year after his sellout show at Leo Castelli's gallery - the show that catapulted his work to an unprecedented level of appreciation. Following the show, Time Magazine noted how "Jasper Johns, 29, is the brand new darling of the art world's bright,
brittle avant-garde. A year ago he was practically unknown: since then, he has had a sellout show in Manhattan, has exhibited in Paris and Milan, was the only American to win a painting prize at the Carnegie International and has seen three of his paintings bought for Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art."(Time Magazine, New York, October 1959).
Throughout the mid- to late fifties, Johns explored the concept of painting-as-object with his concentrated focus on flat images, materials and surfaces. With the vibrant and expressionistic works of 1959, Johns challenged himself to present a more complex elaboration of this theme by introducing color and intricate layers of collage. He liked encaustic because he "wanted to show what had gone before in a picture and what was done after." Encaustic (a combination of hot wax and pigment) dries quickly and allows the buildup of individual paint marks to show through the successive layers without smearing. Color itself becomes the subject of this painting, a concept that first emerged in his work earlier that year in paintings such as False Start and its counterpart, Jubilee.
In Colored Alphabet, the ready-made letters or 'figures' reflect both an aesthetic and conceptual preference for "pre-formed, conventional, depersonalized, factual, exterior elements." (Quoted in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 113). Johns employs a reductive approach in order to focus on the essential nature of painting. This desire for objectivity corresponded to the artist's mood at the time. "I had withdrawn into myself, I was avoiding psychology or emotions. But I lived through the work... " Devoid of emotional and intellectual associations, Johns's numbers represent, without describing it, a world reduced to objective, flattened forms. "I'm interested in things which suggest things which are, rather than in judgements," Johns has said. "The most conventional thing, the most ordinary thing - it seems to me that those things can be dealt with without having to judge them; they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy." (ibid., p. 113).
Johns explains how "the most conventional thing" can embody an incongruous characteristic of invisibility. "I looked for subject matter that was recognizable. Letters and numbers, for example. These were things people knew and did not know, in the sense that everyone had an everyday
relationship to numbers and letters, but never before had they seen them in the context of a painting. I wanted to make people see something new. I am interested in the idea of sight, in the use of the eye. I am interested in how we see and why we see the way we do."