From the catalog essay for Gray, by James GRrandeu

A distinct arrangement of hatched marks first appeared in 1972 on the far-left canvas of untitled (1972;Musuem Ludwig, Cologne. Johns has frequently recounted glimpsing the pattern on a passing car: "I only saw it of a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me---literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning" (58)

each of these qoutes can be disproven:

there is nothing literal here, the distended bodies, the qouting of optical illusions, the art historical notes, the formal injokes, the explicit quoting of the thantos/eros dialectic in of the even how the catenary has a corperal element that is never mentioned in the grey essays, in johns drawings 1997-2007, or the general survery of johns drawings, even the reclaiming of the domestic that the flagstone pattern could indicate, all of these suggest a continued discourse that verges on the hidden and the mystic.

They do not repeat, or some of them do, but from the false start pastels in 1960, to the tantric detail from 1980-81, the lines cross each other, move left or right, sections tilt, or create a mess, the repeating does not have the geometrically rigour he is hoping for.

i will give him obsessive.

I am assuming that Dumb here means lacking the ability to speak as opposed to stupid, and the flagstone/cross hatch paintings post 1972 do not speak, but the seasons, and some of the art historically based work from the 1980s squawk endlessly, there referents obvious and overripe with meaning. Johns never managed Warhol's blankness, or Rberg's tightly curated webs of carefully constructed referents (ie rberg has the narrative skill that johns lacks) so if it isnt quite a formal order, or a symbolic order or a narrative order, all things that he is pushing forward, then what exactly is being ordered?

and one does not chose terms like false start, or tantric, or flag or target or the critic sees w/o thinking about some kind of meaning.

From Mapping the Mind, same volume, Barbara Rose:

Greenberg had to expunge Johns from the canon for a number of reaons, most pointedly because it was obvious that Kenneth Noland==who Greenberg celebrated--had pilfered the format of his concentric circle painting directly from John's targets. Even more troubling was the fact that if Johns were allowed into the ranks of the chose, the keystone of Greenberg's argument that painterliness was dead would crumble. Greenberg had to admit that Johns had a nice hand. But he dimissed this talent wit h a brash as minor, implying that Johns was nothing more than a hand, ignoring the multitude of new issues that John's paintings placed at the centre of contemporary aesthetic practice. (146)

Noland is a better controlled painter then Johns, Noland's concentric circles were doing different work then John's targets, but she is right, that the four horsemen are still unappreciated for their painterly skills or their draughtsmenship, because critics like greenberg would lose if he admitted it, and because critics post greenberg were not interested in textual authority.

From The Drawings of Jasper Johns, a show at the National Gallery of Art, Washingto, 1991

In 1973 Johns resumed making skin drawings from impressions of parts of the body, Untitled (Study for Skin...) is an impring of a penis. Sunsquent drawings, Skin 1 and Skin II of 1973 are impressions of genitals and buttocks. The drawing in the colleciton of Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf, is the only skin impression Johns has made of his full torso, with head, arms, and hands...) 173


Untitled 1978:
This graphically vivid work was made the year after Johns Untitled Savarin drawing, in which handprints located near the handles of paintbruses stand in for the craoshatching. Here Johns painted a cross hatch pattern with marks made by his fingerprints and strokes of paint pplied with his fingers. Johns short strokes in the cross hatch paitnings are often bunched in groups of four or five, or six and might be desrcibed as resembling the digits of a hand... (234)

The presence of the body in Johns work is told by rumour, innuendo, gossip, impression, and hint. It is noted obliquley, and this does not change. This is the difference b/w his work and warhol's work.

In Tantric Detail Johns paired explicit sings for sex and death in a matrix of hatch marks to produce one of his most haunting compoisitons. This large charcoal, his only drawing of the shubject, is identical in size to the three oils...like cropse and mirro compositions, Tantric detail is divcided into three horizontal bands, and the hatch marks shift direction at the juncture of each section. Unlike the corpse and the mirror works, however no mirroring is present from one side to the other in the form of idnetically reflecting cross hatch patterns. (255)