![]() "There was very little art in my childhood. It was not a happy time and he says he was always "dying" to get away from it. His father was a farmer and divorced from his mother, and Johns grew up being passed between various relatives. His circumspection might derive in part from his background like Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, two artists with whom Johns has much in common, he grew up in the south at a time when those with artistic aspirations were advised to suppress them. I tell him I can't imagine him ever using a title like Emin's. Johns lived for seven years with the artist Robert Rauschenberg but is loathe to talk about it publicly. "Of course." I'm thinking in particular of Tracey Emin you can't get much further from Johns' position on autobiography (horror) than Emin's work, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. Not untypically, an American critic writes: "By connecting looking to eating and the cycle of consumption and waste, Johns not only further de-aestheticised looking and art-making but also underscored art's connection to the body's passage of dissolution."Īn exhibition of Johns' recently opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and I ask whether he has much time for modern British artists. But he has also inspired a lot of nonsense. Lots of deep things have been said about Johns' use of irony and ambiguity, his talent for suggesting multiple meanings that was evident from the time of his first exhibition in 1958, in Leo Castelli's gallery in New York. He talks in short, enigmatic sentences, which teasingly deflate all the wind-baggery that has been written about him. He asks me not to use a tape recorder because it makes him tongue-tied. Johns is not reclusive, but neither is he forthcoming. "I haven't had any parties here," he says drily. And at different times you'll come up with different uses." We have settled on the first floor of the barn, in a big airy room which I observe would be great for parties. "You'll come up with your own use for it. "I don't think it matters what it evokes as long as it keeps your eyes and mind busy," says Johns of art in general. When he emerged on the art scene in the late 1950s, Johns' tightly controlled studies of everyday objects, his sculptures of coffee tins and ale cans, were read as a rebuke to Jackson Pollock and the abstract impressionists and he has since been called the father of pop art. His claim to the title of World's Greatest Living Artist is buttressed by his amazing wealth - one piece alone went for £12m - and the iconic status of Flag, one of his earliest works, an equivalent in American college bedrooms to the place occupied in British ones by Matisse's Blue Nude. He's aware that by explaining what he means, he risks limiting the meanings that can be derived from it by others. Johns does not particularly like talking about his art. On the wall he has pinned a handwritten reminder: "Don't forget the string." He moves with a slowness suggestive of irony and has that Jimmy Stewart knack of looking doleful and amused at the same time. When we arrive, Johns is in the studio, hunched over an etching. ![]() The estate is in Sharon, a small town two hours from New York, where the size of the properties makes running into the neighbours mercifully improbable. From the east, it looks out over the hills of Connecticut from the west, across a lawn towards the house. In the grounds of his house, Jasper Johns has a studio, a huge converted barn in which the 74 year old does most of his work.
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