Jasper Johns - Ideas in Paint

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Arts, Biography Documentary published by ArtHaus in 2005 - English narration

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Jasper Johns had his first solo show in 1958 and, almost from that moment, he has been a sensation in the art world. His paintings now routinely change hands for tens of millions of dollars. Rick Tejada-Flores produced and directed this intriguing documentary on the work of Johns, which is built around interviews with many of his contemporaries as well as the artist himself. This film provides a rare look at his life, career and inspirations, and includes both new and vintage conversations with the painter. As well as seldom seen footage of Johns at work in his studio. Johns’ relationship with Robert Rauschenberg, who he met after his arrival in New York in the early 1950s, is identified as crucial to the development of Pop Art. This was the beginnings of an artistic consciousness removed from the prevalent abstract expressionism. The flags, maps and targets that became Johns’ trademark are an example of art made of things ‘the mind already knows’. Rauschenberg and Johns were redefining what art is and, in so doing, paved the way for people like Warhol and Lichtenstein. Johns has always been a controversial figure, however, and his works have met far from universal acclaim. In this portrait Hilton Kramer, editor of New Criterion, describes his career as a ‘downward slide’ away from his first seminal representation of the American flag. Even a keen admirer like the artist Frank Stella laughingly talks of Johns’ work as a ‘very sophisticated, or very unsophisticated, version of finger-painting’. Yet, as the film reminds us, he is also the artist who Time Magazine described as ‘the new Rembrandt’. Johns archly remarks that, as an artist, one is just ‘pleased you can make something and sell it’.