Artist of the Week - (Linking to ABC Wednesday)

J is for Jasper Johns

born May 15, 1930

Jasper Johns is an American contemporary artist who works as a painter, printmaker and sculptor. In the late 1950’s, Jasper Johns emerged as force in the American art scene. His richly worked paintings of maps, flags, and targets led the artistic community away from Abstract Expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete. Johns laid the groundwork for both Pop Art and Minimalism. Today, as his prints and paintings set record prices at auction, the meanings of his paintings, his imagery, and his changing style continue to be subjects of controversy. read the rest here.

 

"To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist."

 ~Jasper Johns

 Flag

 1954-55

 (encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted to plywood)

42 x 61 in.
Museum of Modern Art, New York

"One night I dreamed I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it. And I did. I worked on that painting a long time. It's a very rotten painting—physically rotten—because I began it in house enamel paint, which you paint furniture with, and it wouldn't dry quickly enough. Then I had in my head this idea of something I had read or heard about: wax encaustic."

~Jasper Johns 

 Target

1958

 MoMA, New York

"Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another. "
Jasper Johns

 Map

 1961

MoMA, New York

"I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason."

~Jasper Johns

Color Linoleum Cut
5 Linoleum blocks cut by the Artist and Printed on
Handmade Kurotani Mitsumata paper
22 3/4 x 17 inches 

Racing Thoughts

 1983

 (painting, collage and assemblage)

Collaboration was an important part in advancing Johns’ own art, and he worked regularly with a number of artists including Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Naumann. In 1967, he met the poet Frank O’Hara and illustrated his book, In Memory of My Feelings.

SOURCES:

American Masters

  JasperJohns.com

The Artchive

Joseph K. Levine Fine Art

MoMA - Jasper Johns: A Retrospective

Linking to ABC Wednesday, Round 8

An Andy Warhol Christmas

The American artist and pop icon Andy Warhol was one of the first artists I admired as a middle-school kid in the early seventies.  But I only discovered his sweeter side when I looked at a package of Christmas cards about ten years ago. 

The following is an excerpt from a Washington Post article entitled A Look at Andy Warhol's Spiritual Side:

The man often called the Pope of Pop attended Mass several times a
week, worked in a soup kitchen, kept a crucifix and devotional book on
his bedside table and prayed daily with his mother, a devout Byzantine
Catholic who lived with him until her death in 1972.

(For a more complete post on the life and work of Andy Warhold, please see my post here)

 

ABC Wednesday and Artist of the Week - Warhol

W is for Warhol

 Andy Warhol

(August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987)

American Pop Artist

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."

~Andy Warhol

 (one of my favorite Warhol photos)


“I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say "figment."

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room row house apartment at 73 Orr Street in Pittsburgh. His parents, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants Andrej and Julia Warhola, had three sons. Andy was their youngest.
Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family attended mass regularly and observed the traditions of their Eastern European heritage. Warhol’s father, a laborer, moved his family to a brick home on Dawson Street in 1934. Warhol attended the nearby Holmes School and took free art classes at Carnegie Institute (now The Carnegie Museum of Art). In addition to drawing, Hollywood movies enraptured Andy and he frequented the local cinema. When he was about nine years old, he received his first camera. Andy enjoyed taking pictures, and he developed them himself in his basement.  Read the rest of the biography here

"Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
Andy Warhol

Self-Portrait

"I am a deeply superficial person." 
~Andy Warhol

Gold Marylin

1962

"I love it when you ask actors, 'What're you doing now?' and they say 'I'm between roles.' To be living life between roles.' That's my favorite."

 ~ Andy Warhol

 Eight Elvises
1963

The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market." $100 million is a benchmark price that only Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-August Renoir, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning have achieved.^[1]

 Jackie

1964 

"I think everybody should like everybody."

Velvet Underground album cover

Originally released in March 1967 by Verve Records. Recorded in 1966 during Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event tour, The Velvet Underground & Nico would gain notoriety for its experimentalist performance sensibilities, as well as its focus on controversial subject matter expressed in many of their songs.

1969

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest."
Andy Warhol

Flowers

1970

 Mao

1972

Andy Warhol's Mao Tse Tung (1972) is a silk-screen portrait of the Chinese leader that was made in many versions. It is one of the series of silk-screens that he made on the subject of fame. They began in the early 1960s with his many portraits of Marilyn Monroe whose sad death in 1962 led him to contemplation of what it meant to be famous and what it could possibly be worth. read the rest at Lots of Essays.com

Note:  best for last but chronologically out of order:  Warhol cats from the 1950's. I also like his little Christmas drawings which I hope to feature sometime in the coming week.

 

"It's all about your attitude."

Sources:

The Warhol Museum

 ^{Warhol biography:  scenes of cinema e-journal} 

The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

 <sup>Lots of Essay.com

The Modern Cat 

Thinkexist</sup>

^{See other participants at ABC Wednesday}

Characters on Canvas: Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein by Red Grooms

Red Grooms (born Charles Rogers Grooms on June 7, 1937) is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life. Grooms was given the nickname "Red" by Dominic Falcone (of Provincetown’s Sun Gallery) when he was starting out as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown and was studying with Hans Hofmann.

Gertrude Stein also appears in this photograph by Man Ray, with her Picasso-painted portrait in the background.