Jasper Johns American, b. 1930

Jasper Johns is one of the most influential artists of the postwar period, best known for his paintings and sculptures depicting familiar symbols such as flags, targets, numbers, and maps. Emerging in the mid-1950s, Johns played a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and Conceptual art, redefining the relationship between image, meaning, and perception.

Born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina, Johns moved to New York in the early 1950s, where he became part of a circle that included Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage. Rejecting the emotional intensity and gestural excess of Abstract Expressionism, Johns turned to what he described as “things the mind already knows.” By using preexisting symbols, he shifted attention from personal expression to the act of seeing and the material structure of the artwork itself.

Johns is closely associated with encaustic painting, a technique involving pigment mixed with hot wax, which allowed him to build dense, tactile surfaces while preserving traces of process. His early Flag and Target works confounded distinctions between representation and abstraction, presenting recognizable images while insisting on their physical reality as objects. These works questioned authorship, originality, and meaning at a moment when American art was undergoing profound transformation.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Johns expanded his visual vocabulary to include numbers, letters, crosshatches, and fragments drawn from art history. His work became increasingly complex and introspective, often incorporating references to memory, time, and mortality. While his imagery remained restrained, his use of layering, repetition, and quotation produced works of considerable conceptual depth.

Johns has worked across painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing, maintaining a rigorous and evolving practice for more than six decades. His influence extends across multiple generations of artists, particularly in the development of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual approaches that foreground systems, symbols, and materiality.

Critically acclaimed from an early age, Johns achieved major institutional recognition with his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1977, one of the youngest artists to receive that honor. Subsequent retrospectives and exhibitions have further cemented his standing as a central figure in modern and contemporary art.

Today, Jasper Johns is regarded as one of the most important American artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. His work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate, affirming his enduring impact on the course of postwar art.