KAREN WILKIN
535
fresh and vigorous drawing demonstrating both the skill typical of the
early seventeenth century and the elegance of the particular painter. The
show was installed more or less chronologically, with unexpected juxta–
positions all along, revealing unlikely relationships between artists nor–
mally segregated by the tidy-mindedness of art history courses. A Sheeler
of pristine farm buildings, for example, looked surprisingly close to a ru–
ral scene by Boucher, filtered through the geometricizing vision of Cu–
bism. The selection seemed, at times, a little expedient, but the effort was
nonetheless impressive and the result worth paying attention
to.
Ms. Lee's
shows have consistently been of a high standard, and this venture, the sort
of show a museum rather than an individual dealer (or even a pair of
them) might be expected to do, was a welcome addition to the season.
That is not to say that a museum's participation is any guarantee of
quality, as the Jasper Johns drawing retrospective at the Whitney made all
too clear. I've always found Johns most interesting as a draughtsman, so I
went to the show with some expectations.
It
was bound to be better
than his painting retrospective organized by the same institution some
years ago, I thought, but alas, the same problems were evident. The fault
is, however, not the Whitney's but the artist's. As in the painting
exhibition, the earliest works - the slightly perverse, obsessively worked
flags, targets, and numbers that first established Johns's reputation - had a
presence and conviction that the other work lacked. The choice of
images already flat and utterly familiar, so that they are recognized rather
than seen, shifts the emphasis, in these early efforts, to the artist's sensual
touch. The tension between banal image and rich facture is a large part
of what these pictures are about and the source of whatever power they
possess.
In
his next series, Johns turned his attention to three-dimensional
objects, either preexisting or of his own manufacture - portraits of his
beer can sculptures, for example - and found himself in the realm of
relatively conventional depiction. Tone and stroke never seem quite to
break free of rendering. They always seem subservient to the nominal
subject, and the battle between half-glimpsed iconic allusion and the
artist's will that enlivens the earlier work is completely absent.
Johns may have been aware of this, because his next series, the
"crosshatches," dispensed with recognizable imagery all together. The
subject here is the conventions of drawing: the creation of spatial illu–
sion, but without the depiction of space; the repetition of strokes, but
without their attachment
to
anything identifiable. The crosshatch draw–
ings can be very handsome, but they often lack the punch of those first
uncomfortable works . The struggle is gone, replaced by facility and
manner. It's kinder not to dwell on Johns's subsequent work, that des–
perate recycling of earlier images and strategies that turns into self-parody.
It's kinder still to ignore his most recent work, seen in unnecessary depth
