CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/27/2019

Something resembling truth in 'Jasper Johns'

"One hopes for something resembling truth," Jasper Johns said in 2006, "some sense of life, even of grace, to flicker, at least, in the work." Reproduced from the new paperback edition of the Royal Academy's stellar recent traveling exhibition catalog, our featured image for Memorial Day is "Flag on an Orange Field II" (encaustic on canvas, 137.5 x 92.1 cm, Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland)—a painting that looks as fresh today as it did when it was completed in 1958. "Johns's flags and targets intrigued precisely because they were so seemingly commonplace," Morgan Meis writes. "So commonplace, in fact, that they begged for another look. A second look at a Jasper Johns flag or target tends to produce a flicker of doubt. We know how to see these objects without necessarily knowing how to see them. That's to say, a Johns painting of a flag or a target occupies a strange place in the world of things. The flags and targets are both paintings of objects in the world, and actually are those things in the world. Johns's painting of a flag is a painting of a flag—and it also is a flag."