Jasper Johns Collection needs a home
April 18, 2013
By Temple Ligon
April 11, 2013
South Carolina’s Jasper Johns turns 83 in May. He was born in the Augusta hospital because it was the hospital closest to Allendale where his parents lived. Johns’s father, a Wake Forest law school graduate who never practiced, pulled out of the family when Johns was two. Johns’s mother divorced and moved away, and Johns’s grandfather in Allendale assumed parenting responsibilities.
Johns’s grandfather died when Johns was about to enter the fourth grade. His mother, remarried to Robert E. Lee, had Johns move to her house on Columbia’s South Edisto near A. C. Moore Elementary, where Johns spent the fourth grade. For the fifth through the tenth grades Johns lived near the west side of Lake Murray with his widowed Aunt Gladys Johns Shealy and her four boys. He moved again to live with his mother for the eleventh grade at Edmunds High in Sumter, where he was valedictorian.
Johns attended college for three semesters at USC in Columbia, and he dropped college to follow the advice of his USC professors. He moved to New York.
The Korean War broke out in 1951, and Johns was drafted in the army and was trained as a machine gunner. But the army recognized his art talents and put him to work teaching art and painting posters. After about a year at Ft. Jackson following training and six months in Japan, Johns was out of the army and back in New York.
He and his good friend artist Robert Rauschenberg designed and decorated Fifth Avenue store windows for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany, running a respectable income stream to afford the essentials and painting supplies.
In late 1954, after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in primary and secondary schools and practicing all the flag etiquette that came with the military, Johns dreamed the American flag. The next morning he bought paints in red, white, and blue, and he began the most important American painting of the century. Flag, finished in early 1955, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. White Flag, also finished in early 1955, hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In early 1958, Johns put together his four years of work beginning in 1954 for a solo artist show at New York’s Leo Castelli Art Gallery. Flag was the hit of the show, and the Museum of Modern Art bought three paintings for its permanent collection, while architect Philip Johnson bought Flag and put it in the museum on a long-term loan.
Johns was an overnight sensation, and he was put among the top tier of living American painters, where he has risen further, finally to the top. A Flag from the mid-’60s sold in a confirmed private sale three years ago for $110 million.
The three most important American painters for the last century are Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. Abstract Expressionist Pollock paved the way for Johns in that Pollock took action drip painting about as far as it could go, and Johns saw his opportunity to point painting in a whole new direction, laying distance between himself and Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. That distance could be called early Pop Art, which paved the way for Warhol and his followers. In other words, Johns left Pollock ‘s circle behind while he also opened up the way for Warhol. As the pinion in painting, Johns can be called America’s most important painter of the 20C, and his Flag (1955) is the most important American painting of the 20C
When Picasso died about 50 years ago, he was one of the world’s richest men. And his personal art collection reflected such wealth. His own work that he kept and never sold began to jump in price the day he died. His family expected to inherit the collection, but the French government gave it a tax value well above anything the family estimated. Upon the death of a great artist, the work of the departed artist skyrockets in value due to the new scarcity, the guaranteed cap on the artist’s number of works.
The French government and the Picasso heirs cut a deal: The government got the art, and the family got everything else. Hence, the Picasso Museum in the Marais district in Paris.
Jasper Johns never married. His family members who might be called heirs are distant and few. Former South Carolina Governor Dick Riley, for instance, is Johns’s first cousin.
Where should Johns’s personal permanent art collection find a home?
The world wants to see it, but the world has plenty of great cities with great art museums. Leaving the Johns Collection in the usual American repositories – New York, Chicago, and San Francisco – will be appreciated by the art lovers in those cities, but Johns won’t be the agent of change so much. Besides, no matter where the Johns Collection ends up, the whole world will find it. Like the Forest Lake cocktail party: It doesn’t really matter where they put the bar because everybody will always find the bar.
Putting the Johns Collection in Columbia, on the other hand, could be an earth-shaking event for the Midlands, not to mention a radical rise in the city’s high-brow visitor count.
The Johns Collection should connect with the Columbia Museum of Art for management, security, board oversight, and the like, but a separate building is fitting. In Houston the Menil Collection runs the Cy Twombly Gallery in a separate building next door. Pritzker Prize recipient architect Renzo Piano designed both the Menil Collection and the Cy Twombly Gallery, and the Johns Collection should aspire equally high.
Columbia should aspire for great art. Jasper Johns started here. This is home.
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