ART IN THE FIFTIES - JASPER JOHNS

         Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia. Johns began drawing at a very young age, with a vague intention of wanting to become an artist. Jasper Johns was known as a major post war, American artist. Creating new, original and unique art work was his key force that shaped many of the artistic movements that followed Abstract Expressionism.  He was best known for his paintings and lithographs of flags, maps and numbers. Johns also integrated sculptural elements, displaying everyday objects in new artistic light.

         He took the art world in a new direction by endowing everyday objects with artistic importance, paving the way for Pop art and Minimalism. He synthesized his ideas about art into a new artistic aesthetic, creating concrete images over abstractions. 

        The new style was usually understood to be antithetical to the expressionistic gestural abstraction of the previous generation. Partly because of his paintings that extended the all over compositional techniques of Abstract Expressionism.. John's early style can be exemplified by the large monochrome White Flag of 1955. This painting was preceded by a white, red and blue version of the flag, and the followed of course, by a numerous paintings and prints of flags in various mediums, including the elegant oil on paper flag used in 1957. After that, in 1958, Johns painted the Three Flags, in which three canvases were superimposed on one another in what appears to be reverse perspective, projecting towards the viewer. 

         After creating “ The Flag,” his ground breaking and best known work, Jasper Johns used furniture paint, newspaper collage, and a wax encaustic technique used by ancient Egyptian painters to create images derived from real shapes and objects. Separating an object from its symbolic connotations, Johns used strong, graphic shapes depicting popular icons such as flags, targets, letters, numbers and maps. Johns became a promoter of the Minimal and Conceptual movements, as well as Pop Art, producing prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs, that definitely made a great contribution to art.