thinking more about rauschenberg, warhol, johns and lichenstein in the 70s and 80s, since seeing mirror 2. i am thinking of important or vital or challenging or formally engaged work at that point

1. rauschenberg had cardboard and related works, consisting of cardbird, the tampa clay peices and the egyption varraitions, plus the hoarfrost series, so thats at least four.
   
2. warhol had the collabrations wih basquiat, the piss paintings, the last suppers, ladies and gentlemen, and some of the portraits. at least five
3. lichenstein had entablatures, the mirror series, the brush strokes, and the art historical reworkings, including the Monets so thats four as well.
   
4. what did johns have? i am reading his catalog for he 1996 NY:MoMA retro right now, and its really medicore, the cross hatch is the most famous work from that peroid, and i havent written any critics defending that...

am i missing any by johns? (maybe his lead reliefs from the late 60s, and the unrelentingly, deadening bleakness of the tragically, literally, limp dick catenary series, maybe?) (and the thing is, i think the gray show, is a way of positing him as intellectual and serious, to maintain the narrative of him as a great painter, maybe to justify the markets)

carol vogel, for the new york times:

To hear it from curators, gray is not just a familiar color for Johns but the essence of a long metaphysical journey, an exploration of "the condition of gray itself." At least that's the premise of a sprawling exhibition of his work that opens Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

(she is distancing herself, she is not claiming the colour imparts seriousness, but that curators do) (vogel then spends most of the rest of the article talking about Johns history, and his carribean vacation home)

Strangely enough, by limiting the scope of the presentation to what would seem to be the most boring “noncolor” imaginable, many of the works seemed newly vibrant.

Time Out Chicago, not known for its high tone, and its a postive review, a postivie review for the 70s and 80s stuff, but he does find the history of work dull, the reshuflling a way of looking tired work anew.

Since then, Johns’s career highs and lows have been documented and debated; admirers have turned him into a cult; detractors have disparaged him as “undernourished and overthought”; his art has been exhibited and sorted according to motif, medium, period, and iconography. “Jasper Johns: Gray,” the Metropolitan’s exhibition of 119 paintings, prints, sculptures, and drawings in shades of gray spanning 50 years, ushers us into Middle Kingdom Johns. Although the show is ravishing and brings you into close contact with the numinous ways Johns combines process, materials, tangibility, language, thought, and seeing, it’s too big. That in turn robs it of some of the radiance it had this fall at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the Met, the works are set too close together; a small alcove is crammed with ten pieces; shiny black floors, stark white walls, and a lack of natural light impede the resonant sensuality and obdurate otherness of Johns’s work. As alluring as “Gray” is, it reminds us that although the Met gets the first 50,000 years of art so right, it often gets the last 50 wrong.

This is Saltz, in Time Out New York, and it is a ravishing defense of the indefensible the thing is, 119 paintings on a theme, or of one colour, in 50 years, is not a lot, warhol's career did thousands of portraits, Rberg did hundreds of collages, Lichtenstein pumped out prints one after another, and even people were more careful, did more work, Pearlstein paints 2 or 3 nudes a year, for the last 40, which brings him past 100, Bechtle makes a dozen prints and a painting a year... its not even encaustic, because Theibaud works in Tempera, a much more difficult work, and still produces at a greater rate...i think that artists can make a small body of work and do other things, and still have an impt career, i am not making an arguement in favour of prolfigacy (though my favourite artists are multi genre, multi editioned, artists with huge practices--but its like johns is barely trying. if 119 is too big, if we cannot handle 119, or if the only way we can handle 119 is to make category based on formal sets, then the work lacks a polymorphus sensiblity that marks the best artists.

With gamesmanship and decoding set aside, you start to understand not only how Johns imposes thought on his work but how his work imposes thought on him. His short, repeating Cézanne-like brushstrokes, preserved in the encaustic, have the uncanny effect of slowing down seeing but speeding up though

t.

This is the standard arguement in favour of Johns lately, that by the sheer act of painting, means something---but that slowign down/speeding up is a lithe rhetorical trick, but i am not sure it means anything, i am assuming he is talking about the cross hatch, or the more abstract paintings here, but he is nto playing the same game as cezanne--looking at the bathers for example, you see so much in the bathers, formal things, like the tonal varrations in flesh, fabric and landscape; historical things, like salon odlesiques, and historical nudes; miracles of painting, like how these 2d creatures put weight on one leg, or how their foot flattens, so the work destablizes, and the secret mystery of what is happening in these situtations, with these men and women, the lost narratives just barley implied--i dont think we can do this with john for a couple of reasons
1) he isnt as good a painter as people think he is, he isnt nearly as good a paitner as cezanne, and for americans in the last half of the 20th century, bechtle, pearlstein, warhol, sue williams, karen killiminik to name four, are better examples then johns of what saltz is gettign at--there is a masterpeice of a bechtle paitning, at the berkley art musuem, that does all of the formal, historical, miracolous, things of cezanne, that escape the kabbalism of johns secret life. i took a bad picture of it, but its a white car, in front of a white wall, with a man in a white shirt, and there are grey sidewalks, etc. the flatness is the opposite of the rough encaustic in the best of johns work, and the lack of texture is sort of the point--but the glacial movements between minute varations of white and grey, is not banal, is nto bleak, it is holy almost, or at least sublime, in a way that is respect w/o being banal, it is historical as well, a california update of constable or holbein or hals portraits of content merchants showing comfortable middle clas wealth, and that the man is unknown and the location is unknown, being lost in the suburbs, et. al--adds a literal mystery. (the bechtle is 1960 T Bird, from 1967-8) (Paul Richard in Washington Post, in 1967) talks about it thusly:

World art, before cars, was full of horses. Noble, plunging steeds with pounding hooves and floating manes are as often seen in Ice Age caves and Chinese terra cottas as they are in cowboy movies. All sorts of different painters (Frederic Remington, Degas, Leonardo) kept coming back to horses. In the Bay Area, Robert Bechtle's neighborhood, it is vehicles instead.

2) the grey show seems to be an attempt to move about his lack of understanding colour--the bechtle shows that grey is not the absence of colour, but another kind of colour--just like the mirror ii from 1972 by Lichentsein, with its fractured selves shows that white maintains with presence as much as absence. i normally do not argue against diffucult conceptul work, or work that is about personal concerns, or work that is obsessive, or work that is even ugly. i like awkard and ugly, but there has to be a bounce, or a splash or an imposition, or a blankness, or there has to be a there there---thinking of the great work that was made of grey, or white and grey, or grey and black or silver, in the 1957-1967 height of John's, and lets leave it to Americans, just not to make it too difficult, here are 10:

1) robert frank's the americans (1957)
2) agnes martin's white flower (1961)
3) bechtel's t bird (1967)
4) louise nevelson's sky cathedral (1958)
5) Warhol Silver Liz's (1963) (National Velvet and Cleopatra)
6) ryman (choose one, its all the same project, and they all have the same name)
7) eva hesse hang up (1966)
8) carl andre equvilents (1966)
9) twombly leda and the swan (1962) (i know there are other colours here, but its the ovehwelming whites, greys adn blacks that make the point)
10) some of juds early stacked boxes)

(i know that i do this often, the strategy of death by deluge, and maybe its a bit bullying, but i think what im saying, is that johns was working in a tradition of grey work, that living in new york while devopling a grey strategy became an almost default.) (and anyone of the artists i mentioned did more with grey, talked more about grey, figured out what grey meant, not only as a colour, but as an emotion, or not quite an emotion, but as a state of being)

i think what makes a great artist, even if he or she is pushing the same ideas or the same concepts or still working thru, after decades, is a rooting, like a pig for truffles, a rentless commitment for aesthetic solutions to aesthetic problems--and i think johns loves art, but i dont think that he has that rooting (actually i dont really think that, because lots of artists i love do not seek problems or soultions, lots of artists who are fantastic, great, dont bother with the sorting--so i shouldnt be as prescriptive as i am being) (if i had to make a list of things that i think are impt about artists, or more imporantly maybe, or a list of qaulities that artists i find value in, have in common, johns would follow all of them:

yet another list, of those qualities:
1) trans-historical
2) coperal
3) a juxtaposition of interior and exterior directions
4) a control of formal issues (including size, space, colour, etc)
5) a realtion to the work that others are now creating
6) a philosohpical or theoretical grounding
7) a consistency amongst his or her own projects
8) a desire to grease and then wrestle naked wombats

johns has all of those--in spades, he couldnt have more of some of them, and some artists who had all of them were not great artists (larry rivers) and some artists who had almost none of them were great artists (tom wesselman, donald judd, kenneth noland) (and i mean this is a v. queer urban white male in the 21st century related to the history of painting, too) so i guess the question is, why is he so bad, why is his work, that shoudl engage and grow into devotion, is given to slippery half loved critiques, or to discussions of the few things he does well..

everytime i look at olitiski, i feel like yelling to greenbergites, this is what you wanted to stake yr entire rep on--this was what you thot was impt enough that you wanted to convince historians with, this is the best you could bring to the table (esp when they had louis, frankenthaler, noland, and truitt) and everytime i spend anytime with johns--i want to yell at poptimists--this is what you wanted to stake yr entire rep on--this was what wou thot was impt enough that you wanted to convince historians with, this is the best you could bring to the table (esp when we have wessleman, bechtle, warhol, lichenstein, and rberg). i feel like the greenbergites would come up with some pretty great arguements about why i should shut up and start lookign--even reading gorgeous and loving odes to johns genuius, liek this nyrb peice : which started this essay), i feel like we couldnt come up with any great arguements about the same.


two small foot note
The essay features this qoute by Johns: I used gray encaustic to avoid the color situation. The encaustic paintings were done in gray because to me this suggested a kind of literal quality that was unmoved or unmovable by coloration and thus avoided all the emotional and dramatic quality of color. Black and white is very leading. It tells you what to say or do. The gray encaustic paintings seemed to me to allow the literal qualities of the painting to predominate over any of the others.

All of the other artists i have mentioned above recoginize that grey is a colour in itself, and not a way to avoid the colour situtation, and that bluntly, the colour situtation is nto something to be avoided. its also useful to rememebr that no matter how literary a work is, it also has to work visually, a lesson johns could have learnet from the raptously painted and poetically wry ruscha text peices.



the last great masterpeice by lichenstein:


Venetian School, Four Colour Screen Print, 1996. (the year of his death)


The last great masterpeicee from Warhol, From The Last Supper Series, Mixed Media, 1986 (the year of his death)

I cannot find a good picture, but from the reviews, Rauschenbergs last masterpeice, was the mural for the Piano designed Cathedral in Rome, done in 1996.

LAst Great Work For Johns:

High School Days, Lead Relief, 1969 (39 years ago)