Jasper Johns: A Retrospective

Accompanying the major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1996-97, Jasper A Retrospective contains 264 color plates illustrating Johns’s work in all its facets – paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. An introductory essay by Kirk Varnedoe, the exhibition’s curator, looks back through the layers of memory in Johns’s recent work to review the essential themes that have engaged the artist since his epoch-making Flag and Target paintings of the mid-1950s. In the book’s second essay, Roberta Bernstein analyzes a crucial tactic in Johns’s his many methods of referring to predecessor artists ranging from Leonardo and Grunewald to Cezanne, Duchamp, and Picasso. The illustrations for Bernstein’s essay include a fourteen-page section reproducing the images she discusses – a striking visual demonstration of the variety of the art that Johns’s work gathers together and transforms. Varnedoe then takes the opposite approach to Bernstein’s, exploring how Johns’s art has been interpreted by the artists of his and our own from the Pop, Minimal and Conceptual movements of the 1960s through to the new art of today, his work has proved rich enough to have a fundamentally influential impact on an extraordinarily diverse array of artists.
The plates in Jasper A Retrospective are arranged in sections according to the stages of Johns’s career, allowing comparison of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from each period of his art as it has developed and changed. This comprehensive selection of reproductions is interwoven with an illustrated chronology tracing Johns’s life and work with unprecedented accuracy and thoroughness.

This book is in Good readable condition. It has been read and may show some age & wear to the wraps/boards, or light creasing/wear to the pages. The binding may show very minimal wear, or be fully intact. Generally, most wear will solely be superficial. *Image in the listing is stock. There may be variation in the actual product.

*This came from a former professor’s collection, who used low-tack post-it notes to bookmark/annotate his books. Most of them have been removed, however it is possible that a stray few were overlooked. If this is the case, they are both unobtrusive and easily removable. Additionally, there may be annotations. In most, however not all cases, they are solely in the introduction/foreword. Any clarifying questions should be emailed to tornlight@gmail.com*