JASPER JOHNS UNCORKED : Two Extensive Print Exhibitions Flesh Out the Meaning of His Work

Somewhere in memory or imagination I saw a photograph of Marilyn Monroe visiting with Albert Einstein. It didn’t make me think that Monroe was a nuclear physicist or that Einstein was a dirty old man. It made me realize that both of them were celebrities. It was sad and wry to think of Einstein as a celebrity.

At the moment there are two extensive exhibitions hereabouts devoted to the prints of Jasper Johns: The County Museum of Art hosts a 175-work retrospective organized by Riva Castleman of the Museum of Modern Art and on view here to Dec. 6; UCLA’s Wight Gallery concentrates on a 1976 limited edition book called “Foirades/Fizzles,” which incorporates 33 etchings and a lithograph by Johns with five texts by Samuel Beckett, on view to Nov. 15. Fleshed out with trial proofs and related prints, it adds up to some 140 works, so it is a big deal, too.

The annual UCLA Art Council exhibition was organized by James Cuno, director of the university’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, who contributed a particularly lucid and empathetic catalogue essay.

The catalogue contains a photograph of Johns and Beckett together. Beckett looks leathery and hawk-faced like a grizzled merchant seaman whose gray hair is still combed in the pompadour of his Teddy boy youth. Johns could be played by Michael Caine if the actor dyed his hair dark. Johns’ nose looks as if somebody stepped on it. His hooded eyes bug with suspicion and fear. His small mouth is sharp. A skinny snapping turtle ready to chomp your finger off and retreat to his shell.

The two men are together at opposite ends of a couch, spiritually alienated. This photograph could be the most important picture ever taken of Jasper Johns. It is the one that finally scrapes the barnacles off a reputation that obscures the essence of the artist.

As barnacles go, they are pretty nice. They are the encrustations of a widely held belief that this 57-year-old man is the most elegant painter of his time and the most influential. His touch is legendary. Listing artists who don’t owe him is a lot easier than compiling the encyclopedia of those who do: Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Stella, all of the Minimalists, most of the Conceptualists, Ed Rusha, John Baldessari. . . . There is no end to it.

Well, there is. His grip loosens on the Neo-Expressionists and that, too, is to his credit. You have to paint well and think hard to be Johnsian.

He is generally regarded as the direct ancestor of pop art with its ironic love of the commonplace. After all, wasn’t this the guy who made John Q. Artnik think that two ordinary ale cans cast in bronze could be a priceless masterpiece? What a send-up. What a put-on.

Imagine just painting numbers 0 1 2 3 4 5 and like that and making all the art twits think they are profound. Piffle. And the prints? All he does is take the motifs from his painting and repeat them: targets, light bulbs, American flags and maps, coat hangers. What can be the point? Must be money. Jasper’s Greatest Hits.

But then there is that photograph with Beckett. Suddenly there he is with the great dramatist of black, cosmic insignificance whose heroes reside in trash cans and are played by recycled burlesque comics waiting idiotically for God in an alley.

Beckett infuriated a lot of people with plays set on black, empty stages but no literate citizen ever thought he was anything but a gritty, for-real original. And there he is with Jasper Johns and it plays like Addison and Steele, like Gilbert and Sullivan, like Minnelli and Barishnikov. A regular epiphany.

Well, it’s an illusion and it wouldn’t mean a thing if the limited edition “Foirades/Fizzles” book were not so astonishingly right, so rhymed. Anybody who hates arty limited editions has a point. Such productions tend to feel snotty, as if they had a velvet rope and a bouncer in front of them to keep out the unwashed. But this one--published by St. Petersberg Press--feels like it was printed with cinders and grease. It’s tough.

Beckett begins a text: “Horn always came at night. I received him in the dark. . . .” Next to it, Johns placed a sooty image of hand and foot prints. Reading back and forth from image to text is unnerving because they so are clearly the visual and verbal equivalents of one another without any sense of illustration .

Significantly, Beckett and Johns each used work they had done before they agreed to this stand-off collaboration. Johns juxta-posed the word and image with extraordinary sensitivity, but there had to be natural affinities between the two artists. So we are forced to consider Johns, not only in the light of Beckett but of all that Beckett implies--Rimbaud’s poem, “Vowels,” Baudelaire’s “Correspondences.”

Baudelaire and Johns. Sure. There is the French addict’s sense of the exalted station of the artist mixed with a self-loathing of comic grandeur. And their shared conviction that the path to the exaltation of art goes by way of the everyday.

History, fashion, fame and ideology have all gotten in the way of seeing Johns clearly. These two shows uncork the meaning of this art and it gurgles out like rusty water.

Jasper Johns is a poet alone trying to make art by staring at his feet. The poet knows this is ridiculous but for some reason, he is stuck with it and the conviction that he has to work with the ordinary stuff around him.

Oh, he knows why. He actually wants to tell the story of his life. He wants to paint an autobiography, but obliquely. None of the personal stuff, none of the pain. That he is a man he will admit.

There is nothing of women in Jasper Johns’ art save an occasional allusion. Maybe his friendships with men such as fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg or the poet Frank O’Hara come out in the ale cans, matched symbols of equality and conviviality.

Maybe the exquisite hurt of his break-up with Rauschenberg or the death of O’Hara can seep out in the anatomical parts cast from his own body and scattered about his work like martyred carrion.

Johns reminds you he is an artist with every stroke, and artists think about other artists. It used to be believed that Johns spent all his time thinking about Marcel Duchamp and his dandified, enigmatic mind-games. When he thinks about Cubism, Pollock and formalists like Stella, he comes up with those rick-rack patterns and vivid hues. They are beautiful but nasty and jealous.

Now it is clear Johns thinks further back. His targets are a floating visionary eye by Odilon Redon transmogrified into a bull’s eye. His black numerals have the catastrophic fury and grace of Leonardo da Vinci’s apocalypse drawings. He’s a theoretician like Leonardo but a theoretician of language, of the overlap between visual language and written language.

Was he not the first to stencil the word “Red” painted yellow and blue?What does that mean?Lots, but basically with Johns it’s a matter of transformation.

Like any good poet, he is interested in changing one thing into another. That accounts for the repetition of motifs in the paintings and prints. He’s interested in what happens in the translation. More generally he likes, for example, to turn a number into a sunset by Turner. Is he doing a number?Could be a lot of deep puns here. A coat hanger or a bent fork are all the petty aggravations that make us want to kill.

Metaphysical?Never. American!

Johns placed himself squarely in a distinctive Yankee tradition, the allegorical still life artists of the 19th Century--Peto, Haberle, Harnett, who set out to paint still lifes real enough to fool reality. Now there is an activity to try one’s sense of absurdity and make a fellow into a pessimist.

Johns does the same in a more sophisticated way. He’s a kind of subtle Saul Steinberg, even sharing his gloomy view of the human condition, particularly that of the American artist. A pair of Johns’ flags look like the state of mind of the ever-alien American artist, longing for some rip-roaring, join-the-gang patriotism but paralyzed by one’s cultural role as a weirdo and one’s own smug doubts.

All the historical stuff tends to re-muck our view of Johns. Poetry, don’t forget, is clear for all its elusiveness, exceedingly refined for all its common syntax. It is about suspicion, disappointment and nostalgia.

A lot of his most recent work looks like both the personal angry graffiti of a street artist and a lot of old numbers and stuff piled in the attic with cozy grandeur.