Flag (Moratorium)

Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns experimented with seriality, materiality, and appropriation and helped bridge Abstract Expressionism with the modernist art movements that followed, including Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. Johns often pushed the same motif across various media to explore new possibilities for the image. In his famous paintings of the American flag, Johns referenced both concrete iconography and his own previous versions of artworks. Abstract hatchings are another signature motif for Johns. On paper and canvas, these marks highlight the artist’s conscious control of gesture and form: a major divergence from the bravura brushstrokes of Johns’s Ab-Ex predecessors. Johns spent semesters at the University of South Carolina and Parsons School of Design before dropping out and joining the army. In the 1950s, he was part of New York’s avant-garde arts scene alongside longtime friend, lover, and collaborator Robert Rauschenberg. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, Cologne, and San Francisco, among other cities. His work belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Tate, and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.