My New York City friends must think that I’m mighty cultivated, because whenever I visit, I clamor to be taken to museums. Of course, I hardly maintain such a regimented pursuit of culture in my hometown. But as a weekday reader of The New York Times, I often long to visit the exhibitions reviewed in Friday’s Arts section. One such article about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Jasper Johns: Gray” has been stuck in my head since February, making me a determined museum patron on this past weekend’s trip to New York.
Johns was fond of using iconic imagery — his most famous work is his American flag, with the stars lined up in an ominous grid. He also made counterpart prints for many of his paintings to experiment with his favorite motifs — targets, maps, numbers — and found the color gray to be effective in forcing the familiar shapes and forms to be considered literally. I found it alarming when I stared at the American flag in shades of gray and my mind supplied the colors. There were gray paintings with rectangles cut into the canvas, or glued-on forks and spoons, or a string draped across like a necklace. There was peace and serenity in Jasper Johns’ gray works that, as the NYT raved, “amplifies gray into a color spectrum all its own.”
Sometimes, art is so visually pleasing that it has the power to stand by itself, without a critic’s interpretation or commentary to enhance its enjoyment. And then there’s Jasper Jones, whose cryptic, aesthetically unpleasing paintings sent most of the museum patrons flocking the Gustave Courbet exhibit down the hall to relish in the classic, colorful scenes of animals, landscapes, and nudes.
Here is a slideshow of some works from “Jasper Johns: Gray.”
