For now, he keeps reflecting on his past and working out his future in sculpture, collage, and paint as he enters his nineties. At least I cannot name a challenger, and I often wonder who that will leave after his death. With the death of Robert Rauschenberg in 2008, Jasper Johns rules unchallenged as greatest living artist. It makes them all the plainer and all the more unfamiliar. Johns is not waving his white flag in surrender, and the boldness of Three Flags, one in front of the other, still pops right off the wall. These are flags and targets, but not where you expect them-up a flagpole or on a distant tree. Oh, and it speaks of the show's wild layout over two museums, comparable but never quite the same-and its overwhelming challenge for you. It speaks to the motif of doubling in some of his best-known works and the mind games that they play. How can all that be true? What can maps, flags, numbers, and targets conceivably say about Johns himself? What can they say about modern art or, for that matter, the United States? The show's title, "Mind Mirror," speaks to the inner world of an artist's mind and the outer world that art can hope to reflect. Nearly sixty years after his first target paintings, he is still targeting modern art. If you have lived through those years, it may sum up your first encounters with art as well. It is overwhelming for another reason, too: it sums up an artist's life, from youthful exuberance to anticipations of death. An opening wall of prints, hung salon style, brings home how many of them have become central images of late modern art-and then the career survey starts all over again at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on much the same scale. The Whitney Museum gives it every nook and cranny of its largest floor, for more than two hundred works. This museum blockbuster extends far more than a block. Jasper Johns in retrospective is overwhelming. Jasper Johns (in conversation with Irving Sandler) Jasper Johns: A Retrospective Well, a painting of a flag is at once a flag and a painting and there's no avoiding that.
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