Unprecedented joint exhibit of Jasper Johns planned by PMA and Whitney Museum
The 60-year career of Jasper Johns, one of the great artmakers of his generation, will be the subject of an unprecedented simultaneous exhibition in the fall of 2020, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City jointly present a full retrospective covering every aspect of the 86-year-old artist's career.
The 60-year career of Jasper Johns, one of the great artmakers of his generation, will be the subject of an unprecedented simultaneous exhibition in the fall of 2020, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City jointly present a full retrospective covering every aspect of the 86-year-old artist's career.
Perhaps best known publicly for his paintings of American flags, targets, maps, and numbers, Johns has delved deeply into drawing, sculpture, and printmaking, as well. His work reaches back to Marcel Duchamp and helped usher in an era of pop and conceptual art, postmodernism, and representation, transforming the visual landscape of the fine arts.
When they open in New York and Philadelphia in four years, the combined exhibits will be the first Johns retrospectives since the Museum of Modern Art's "Jasper Johns: A Retrospective" in the fall of 1996.
The PMA and the Whitney jointly announced collaborative plans Thursday.
"To show the work in all its complexity, to show the work in all its richness, we thought we might need more than one institution," said Carlos Basualdo, PMA senior curator of contemporary art, and co-curator of the retrospective.
Scott Rothkopf, Whitney deputy director for programs and chief curator, and co-curator of the exhibit, noted that a usual retrospective "presents the work of an artist in one place and at one time."
But in this instance, due to the range and influence of Johns' work, Basualdo and Rothkopf agreed it would be appropriate to go beyond the usual.
"Jasper has made a tremendous amount of work over the last 60 years," Rothkopf said. "This [dual exhibition] will allow us to explore different ideas in greater depth. We'll be able to pause, and dig deeper, dig deeper into printmaking, for instance, dig deeper into Jasper's fertile and constantly evolving mind."
Rothkopf said he could think of no similar example of dual-institution, simultaneous exhibition in this country.
Basualdo noted that both the art museum and the Whitney have strong associations with Johns. In July of 1988, Johns won the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for an exhibition of his work organized by PMA curator Mark Rosenthal. That exhibition, covering about 14 years of work, then traveled to Philadelphia.
The Whitney, said Rothkopf, has a deep sampling of Johns' work in its permanent collection.
In the joint retrospective, very much in its early planning stages, each part of the show will be conceived as a separate whole, the curators said. Each part will be different, and the hope is, they agreed, that visitors will be encouraged to visit both.
"We imagine at this point, that each show will stand on its own," said Basualdo. "But both shows will give you a fuller account."
In Philadelphia, he said, there is a strong interest in Johns going back to the tenure of late director, Anne d'Harnoncourt, a lover of Duchamp who early on became excited by Johns' work.
"The Duchamp we know, we know through Johns," Basauldo said. "The history of Johns' work and the reception of Johns' work looked to Duchamp. That conciousness makes it precious for us."
The art museum is probably the most important repository of Marcel Duchamp works and papers in the world, and as a young man, Johns came to the museum from New York to see Duchamp's enigmatic The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), a favorite.
He has also loaned the museum many works.
Independent curator Judith E. Stein, author of Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, due out Tuesday, characterized the dual exhibitions as "a big deal."
For one thing, she said, parallel shows will allow visitors to see a much wider selection of works, broadening their sense of Johns' artmaking.
She noted that Johns has been a major force in American art since his debut show at Leo Castelli's New York gallery in 1958. Art News editor Thomas B. Hess was "so impressed" by the show that he took a Johns painting, Target with Four Faces (1955), and put it on the cover of the magazine.
"This is unprecedented," Stein said. "But that prescient decision was warranted. Johns helped change our definition of art coming out of the period of abstract expressionism and gesture. . . . What his art led to was a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking about art."
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