CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/25/2014

Jasper Johns: Regrets

Based on a series of John Deakin photographs of the painter Lucian Freud, commissioned in the mid-1960s by painter Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns' newest work, on view at MoMA through September 1, is magical, peculiarly somber, meditative and mesmerizing, according to Holland Cotter of the New York Times. Featured image, an untitled watercolor from 2013, is reproduced from the accompanying catalogue, Jasper Johns: Regrets. Cotter writes, "As the series grows, moving from drawings into paintings, and then into prints, Freud’s figures become mere tangles of line, and from those tangles another image emerges: a human skull with big, empty eyes. It rests on top of the dark rectangle, which now might be read as the door of a tomb, opened onto blackness, oblivion… Because of the title of the series, and the fact that an octogenarian produced it, there’s a tendency to view the show as a valedictory gesture, the end of something. But it doesn’t feel that way at all. It feels assured and centered, quiet but with lots of give, sagely alive."