The World Made Strange: Jasper Johns Between Expressionism and Pop
Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, The Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, New York, September 29, 2021, through February 13, 2022
The received “discourse” among artworld historians goes something like this: Abstract Expressionism shifted the focus from Paris to New York City. With the help of critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, it established itself as the next step forward for painting. It sought to disclose events and experiences of cosmic dimensions: the tragedy of war and injustice (Motherwell), the numinous presence of the absolute (Rothko), the Dionysian frenzies of spontaneous action (Pollock), the sacredness of landscape stripped of detail (Still). It was the artistic equivalent of Existentialism in Philosophy. But Abstract Expressionism was undone by its own highbrow pretenses. It became stuffy and pompous. It was swept away by Pop art’s cool, ironic breezes, which had no affection for depth or the sublime. What Andy Warhol hath wrought was light rather than heavy, playful rather than earnest, pleasantly witty rather than intensely dramatic. His heirs — Oldenburg, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein — expanded the range of the pop sensibility and into comic books, impossible objects, and hyper-realistic airbrushed images of mass-produced commodities. The mantra of the movement was “Dig it!”
