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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| May 8 2007, 2:41 PM EDT (current) | Anonymous | 1 photo added |
| May 8 2007, 2:40 PM EDT | Anonymous |
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Jasper Johns is an inventor of Pop Art.The standard critical assessment of Jasper Johns's career resembles that of de Chirico's - that each had a marvellous beginning which made him a major influence while he was declining well before he was forty years old. Johns had done everything to activate USA powerful drive to sacrifice her gods while the memory of their apotheosis's still fresh. Jasper has played a double game. On the one hand Jasper Johns has toyed obsessively with the motifs that made him famous. Here he has been subject to the law of diminishing returns. Series of his Flags shows that those reallsed after the first ten years have mostly been less vibrant or coarser. This has given good reason to perceive him as a typically fading lyric poet. The same time Johns has constantly explored new thematic material. Those explorations have produced a continuing self-renewal, but the view's widely held that they have been cerebral, arcane and aethetically dry and certainly tend to seem like that when first encountered But there can be an efficacious remedy, which's to follow Wittgenstein's advice: 'Don't think. Look.' What's sure is the very extent of Jasper John's bipartite production has not helped his cause. "The more an artist makes, the more targets he erects." And even a faithful supporter may feel there're many individual pieces for which it's difficult to see a raison "d'être transcending Johns's compulsion to experiment."
