01/10/14
Jasper Johns: Regrets
Courtauld Gallery, London
12 September – 14 December 2014
This small but hugely powerful exhibition
of work by Jasper Johns (b1930) is the second in the Courtauld’s new series of
shows by contemporary artists who speak to a longer history of art. The 10
works selected might be seen not only to summarise the oeuvre of Johns himself,
demonstrating many of his known methods and stylistic marks, but also to tell a
wider story of art and artists, their processes and interactions, and, more
broadly, a prescient – and Old Masterly – tale of life and death.
In the early summer of 2012, Johns
was sent a Christie’s auction catalogue for the sale of Francis Bacon’s Study for Self-Portrait (1964). In it
was a full-page reproduction of a photograph by John Deakin, showing Lucian
Freud posing on a cheap bedstead in Bacon’s studio. Bacon had, unusually, used
this photograph as the starting point for his self-portrait. Johns became
entranced by the image, which, in its reproduced form, had heavy black areas
where Bacon had folded and torn the original, and where the copiers had placed
the damaged original on a backing sheet, and thick, wiggly lines, where he had
creased it. For the next 18 months, Johns worked solely with this image,
creating and recreating numerous versions in pencil, pastel, watercolour,
charcoal, ink on mylar, oil on canvas and etchings with numerous state proofs. All
but the etchings are on display here.
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