Flag

Jasper Johns, 1954-55 · Gallery 408 · Floor 4

Before Jasper Johns paints this, he destroys almost everything he's made. He's twenty-four. And the way he later tells it, he's had enough of trying to become an artist. Time to actually be one. Then he has a dream that he's painting a big American flag. The next morning, he goes out and buys the materials. Starts with a bedsheet and house paint. Except the paint takes too long to dry. He wants to put down a stroke and have it stay there while he does the next one. So he tries hot wax with the color mixed in. Encaustic, it's called. Sets as it cools. So, now he can keep going. Get closer to it. Those stripes are built out of newspaper and bits of cloth, dipped in wax and laid inside pencil lines. You can still read pieces of the paper through the paint. From across the room, an American flag. Up here, he's practically built the thing scrap by scrap. And choosing a flag took one job off his hands. He didn't have to design it. The stars go here. The stripes go there. That part's settled. Now he can get on with making the painting. He called these "things the mind already knows." He'd go on to paint targets. Numbers. Maps. At a time when the big New York painters are making enormous abstract things, Johns starts with something every kid in school could draw. But an American flag comes with a little more baggage than a set of stripes. He starts this in 1954. The year "under God" goes into the Pledge. The year the Senate censures Joe McCarthy. And here's Johns, painting the flag on a bedsheet. Is it a flag? Is it a picture of a flag? People have been arguing about that since the sixties. January 1958. His first solo show, at Leo Castelli's gallery. Alfred Barr, who helped start this museum, wants four paintings. He gets three. This is the one they get stuck on. The people approving the purchase worry it could look unpatriotic. So Barr finds a way around them. Barr gets his architect buddy to buy it, with the idea that he'll give it to the museum later. Later turns out to be fifteen years. Finally Philip Johnson gives it to MoMA. In Barr's honor. And underneath all that trouble, the newspaper's still in there. Stock reports. Ads. A Hollywood figure telling you how to lose weight. And a recipe for applesauce.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 408