Jasper Johns Still Doesn’t Want to Explain His Art

LOS ANGELES — Not long ago, Jasper Johns, who is now 87 and widely regarded as America’s foremost living artist, was reminiscing about his childhood in small-town South Carolina. One day when he was in the second grade, a classmate named Lottie Lou Oswald misbehaved and was summoned to the front of the room. As the teacher reached for a wooden ruler and prepared to paddle her, Lottie Lou grabbed the ruler from the teacher’s hand and broke it in half. Her classmates were stunned.

“It was absolutely wonderful,” Johns told me, appearing to relish the memory of the girl’s defiance. A ruler, an instrument of the measured life, had become an accessory to rebellion.

I thought of the anecdote the other day in Los Angeles, at the Broad museum’s beautiful retrospective, “Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth.” Coincidentally or not, several of the paintings in the show happen to have rulers affixed to their surfaces. It would be foolish, of course, to view Johns’ story about the brazen schoolgirl and the broken ruler as the source for those paintings. But is it fair to describe the anecdote as a haunting, an experience that lodged deeply in his brain while a thousand others were promptly forgotten?

Johns himself is loath to offer biographical interpretations of his work — or any interpretations, for that matter. He is famously elusive and his humor tends toward the sardonic. He once joked that, of the dozens of books that have been written about his art, his favorite one was written in Japanese. What he liked is that he could not understand it.

The Broad show, which remains on view through May 13 and covers six decades, offers a relatively intimate glimpse at his work. In a welcome departure from curatorial convention, the exhibition is organized thematically rather than chronologically. You come to see how the American flags and targets that remain Johns’ most acclaimed motifs are no more persistent than other motifs and themes, including forks and spoons, unsettling images of the human body broken into fragments and the drama of a muted self unable to express its needs.

He says outright that he does not have faith in the process of memory, insisting it is less likely to disclose truths than to twist them. One of his frequent rejoinders is, “Interesting, if true,” in response to statements of incontestable fact.

On the other hand, he seems to enjoy the process of weighing facts and evidence, even while acknowledging their limitations. Or, as he put it: “I’ve always said I would like to be a judge.”

One thing that Johns understood at an early age is that language and truth are not the same. Growing up in the South, at a time when its citizens saw no contradiction between the cultivation of perfect table manners and the barbarism of segregation, he was well aware that people were not always logical. Born in 1930, Johns was the only son of an alcoholic farmer and a mother accustomed to hardship. His parents divorced in 1933, by which time he had been sent to live with his paternal grandfather, the first of many painful dislocations in his childhood. “I was a good guest,” he said, without rancor. “I was always a guest.”

Asked if he plans to travel to L.A. to see his new show, Johns replied solemnly, “I am not going anywhere.” This is not entirely surprising. He has no great passion for travel. His friends say that he prefers to wake up in his own bed in Sharon, Connecticut, amid the familiarity of his rambling country estate, to eat tomatoes and lettuce he picks from his garden, to know that he is no longer a guest.

The idea for the current show originated with Edith Devaney, a curator at the Royal Academy in London, and Roberta Bernstein, an art historian whose scholarship on Johns assumed magisterial proportions last year, with the publication of a five-volume catalogue raisonné of his paintings and sculptures. They were joined in assembling the Broad show by Joanne Heyler, the museum’s founding director; and Ed Schad, a curator and critic. The American faction of the group visited Johns at his home last November, after sending him an elaborate Gatorfoam-board model of their installation. They wanted to ensure that he was happy or at least not miserable about the show’s accents and emphases, which include the flashy and rather LA idea of opening with as many flag paintings as they could gather.

Happily, the idea works. The show gets off to an ebullient start in a gallery ringed by 10 works that relate to American flags but differ in ways that are fun to observe. Masterpieces abound, including a 1958 “Flag” done in Johns’ signature wax-based pigment; “Ventriloquist” (1983), whose double flags give primacy to the secondary colors of green and orange; and the Whitney Museum’s beloved “Three Flags” (1958), with its successively smaller painted panels stacked like the layers of a cake. As you move through the gallery, you start to think less about flags than about Johns’ precise and patient process, the way he savors mark-making, constructing his images with the tactile lushness that Cézanne brought to his scenes of French bathers a century earlier. Perhaps Johns painted the American flag because he wanted to American-ize Cézanne, or conversely, to Cézanne-ify America. Of course, back in the McCarthy-shadowed 1950s, Johns’ flags were often assumed to be freighted with political innuendo. I recently looked up the minutes from a Museum of Modern Art acquisitions committee meeting in 1958. It was surprising to see how much curators fretted over whether to purchase the painting “Flag” (1954-55) for the museum’s collection. According to the minutes, the museum’s curator, William Lieberman, worried that the painting “might expose MoMA to attack from the American Legion or other chauvinistic groups.”

Alfred Barr, MoMA’s founding director, tried to reassure him that the painting was not anti-American. Johns, he insisted, was an “elegantly-dressed Southerner who disclaimed any unpatriotic intentions, and in fact, insisted he had only the warmest feelings toward the American flag.” Nevertheless, Barr postponed acquiring the painting, opting to purchase three others that he viewed as politically safer choices (two targets and a numerals painting).

In explaining the source for his flag paintings, Johns has always said the same thing. The idea came to him in a dream. He does not care to elaborate, or to indulge in dream analysis.

Certainly, it is relevant that he came of age at a time when Abstract Expressionism, the house style of the New York avant-garde, was running out of steam. Younger artists who claimed to be embarked on a quest for spiritual authenticity were turning out gestural abstractions that looked more like imitation de Koonings.

Johns’ early flags and targets, as everyone now knows, rewrote postwar American art by repudiating most everything about Abstract Expressionism — the splashy emotionalism, the metaphysical longings, the well-rehearsed enactments of agony and ecstasy.

Johns’ early flags were radical because they did just the opposite. Instead of turning private feelings into bland public statements, he claimed public symbols for the realm of inwardness and private experience. Viewers were puzzled by his apparent lack of interest in communicating a higher truth in the usual sense. His goal, it seemed, was less to convey a message than to circle cryptically around it.

The sculptor Richard Serra put it as well as anyone when he recently told me: “What Johns did was he presented a new model. There was an abrupt shift. It was sort of like the Beatles kicking out Elvis.”

The Broad show, a version of which was first seen at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in the fall, freely mixes work from different decades, sometimes on the same wall. It implicitly argues that Johns’ later paintings and occasional sculptures can hold their own beside the dazzle of his early works. The paintings in his “Catenary” series, which date from the late 1990s, look especially strong. Most are large, horizontal, gray-hued works that vaguely resemble a blackboard, with an actual string suspended in a U-shape from their top corners. The paintings feel both intimate and vast. Their trademark curved string evokes the anatomical (a breast); the architectural (the span of a bridge); and the cosmic. They have a calm, summing-up feeling, and the slight movements of the string somehow add to their sense of enveloping stillness. Johns is a formidable presence, six feet tall, with a large, craggy face and watchful eyes. He describes his health as moderate to fair, and you can tell that his knees torment him when he stands up from a chair. On most days, he can be found in his studio, tailed by his dog Dougal, a wiry mutt who might have some Greyhound in him, and who arrived from the Caribbean islands two years ago, as a gift from a friend.

Indeed, Johns has no shortage of devoted friends who have known him for decades. Nonetheless, his friends — much like his viewers — can be kept on edge by his remove. Nearly everyone agrees that certain topics reliably engage him, such as gardening and cooking, but that attempts to discuss the meaning of his work with him will bring on instantaneous silence.

Johns, who lives alone and has no apparent heirs, made news last fall when it was revealed that his house and property will eventually serve as an artist’s retreat. The Sharon zoning commission voted unanimously in September to approve the request. It is hardly Johns’ first philanthropic undertaking. In 1963, he and the musician John Cage co-founded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in Manhattan. Just last month, the organization announced its latest raft of grant recipients, some 19 artists who will each receive $40,000. Johns’ planned residency program in Connecticut, by contrast, will provide up to 24 artists at a time with three-month stays in rustic barns and outbuildings on Johns’ property. Meals will be communal, in the main house.

Johns is predictably tight-lipped about his philanthropy, which has always focused on supporting younger artists. The main reason he agreed to cooperate with the Broad on the exhibition, he said, is the chance it represents to reach young viewers. “I like that the show is free,” he told me.

I was sorry to have to break the news to him. An adult ticket for “Something Resembling Truth” costs $25. There is no discount for students at all. To be sure, the Broad continues to offer free access to its third-floor galleries, which house the permanent collection. But there is a charge for so-called “special exhibitions.”

“I don’t think I knew that,” Johns said, appearing perturbed. “I didn’t register that, because I was told that it was a free museum. I have always loved that idea. Haven’t you seen my ‘Free Leonardo’ button? I sometimes wear it. I think it was designed by Richard Hamilton when they were arguing in London.”

Indeed, Richard Hamilton, the ingenious British artist, designed the button in 1998. It was part of a campaign against museum entry fees held during London’s “museum week” in May of that year. It seemed a little puzzling that Johns would want to wear the button so many years after the protest had ended.

But then Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first masters that Johns admired. He was especially captivated by the "Deluge” drawings, their swirling eddies of black chalk giving form to natural disasters. Leonardo drew them toward the end of his life, when his head was filled with apocalyptic visions of torrential floods destroying whole towns and even mountains.

When he was in mid-30s, Johns had a chance to actually see the drawings. They’re housed at the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Kenneth Clark, the art historian, helped him gain access to the Queen’s collection.

Was it an exciting experience? “Yes,” he replied with typical terseness, and a little laugh, “except that they looked exactly like the reproductions.”