Jasper Johns "Studio II" Postcard

In the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns began making paintings of recognizable objects and images, including the American flag, targets, and numbers. As the artist explained, these subjects are “things the mind already knows,” things that are “seen but not looked at, not examined.” In 1954, Johns had a dream that he painted the American flag. He carried out the idea for the first time a year later, and in 1958 he completed Three Flags, arranging three canvases in a concentric stack. He used encaustic, a fast-drying mixture of pigment suspended in warm wax, to accumulate brushstrokes and achieve an agitated, textured surface. Projecting almost five inches from the wall, the work signals, as Johns asserted, that “the painting of a flag is . . . no more about a flag than about a brushstroke, or about the physicality of paint,” or, he might have added, about the painting’s physicality as an object. This oversized postcard features Johns' Studio II (1966).