Jasper Johns at the McNay: Past and Present

This exhibition features prints of one of the contemporary artists best represented in the McNay’s collection and marks an important anniversary in the artist’s career. The McNay began collecting the artist’s work in 1968 with the acquisition of the landmark suite of lithographs Numerals 0-9. The following year, the museum organized the first retrospective exhibition of Johns’s prints. The catalogue for that exhibition, written by the McNay’s founding director, John Palmer Leeper, was the first publication to list all of the artist’s prints to that date and is still an important work in the artist’s bibliography. Recognized as one of the greatest living American artists, Johns is a masterful printmaker whose works often combine Pop art imagery—the American flag, a Ballantine Ale can—with brilliant draftsmanship. Included in the exhibition are Decoy and Decoy II, masterpieces of post-1960 American printmaking that beautifully represent the artist’s working method as well as many of the concepts prevalent in his paintings and prints. Both lithographs are multilayered formally and iconographically. At the center of each composition is a photolithograph of the Ballantine Ale can, one of Johns’ most famous sculptures. Such self-referencing and borrowing from past work is typical of Johns’s art. Surrounding these icons are many different types of lithographic marks: wide patches of painterly tusche and bold lithographic crayon marks predominate. Ribbons of colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet—traverse the composition. By including these elements, Johns gives us a visual inventory of the artist’s “tools” and creates an image that is very much about the artifice of making art, a common theme in Johns’s work and a theme hinted at by the title of each print. This exhibition of more than 30 works is the first time all of the McNay’s prints by Jasper Johns are on public view.