Cheap travel, rich travel
August 29, 2014
By Temple Ligon
The Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues is home for one last weekend to the most recent run of paintings by South Carolina’s Jasper Johns. The exhibition, called Regrets, closes on Labor Day.
If Johns is not your favorite destination, go anyway, just to see what the world’s most famous artist is doing. After all, he’s our homeboy. He spent a year at A. C. Moore Elementary and three semesters at the University of South Carolina.
His False Start (1959) sold several years ago for $80 million, a record for a living artist.
Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta because that was the closest hospital to where his parents lived in Allendale. His father, a lawyer educated at Wake Forest University, really wasn’t worth too much, and the parents of Jasper Johns divorced while he was still a toddler.
In financial straits, the practical thing for his mother was to move in with her former husband’s father in Allendale. The father-in-law, W. I. Johns, was South Carolina’s biggest cotton and tobacco farmer; so with the maids, the big house and the successful farm, Johns didn’t have it so bad. By the time he finished his last year of high school, which was at Edmunds in Sumter, he was the class valedictorian.
At USC he did all right for the short time he was there, but he focused too much on the art and not enough on the general offerings in the liberal arts. In other words, Johns went to college to learn how to paint and not for any other reason. His art professors urged him to drop a university education and go to art school in New York – in particular Hunter College on the Upper East Side.
Hunter College wouldn’t take him. He was a guy, and Hunter was a girls’ school. Johns was told to show up at the Bronx branch of Hunter, the one for boys, but his subway ride to his first day of class was way too long, and he was offended by the level of teaching he saw in his first day. Then he got sick on the subway ride back. He never showed again at Hunter.
Then he began to teach himself how to paint. He got drafted and sent to Japan, but he didn’t have to fight in the Korean War. He painted posters and he taught art to soldiers. He was honorably discharged. He returned to New York to resume his career in art. He and his good friend Robert Rauschenberg, still a struggling painter like Johns, got together as a shop window decorating team at Tiffany and other stores.
He claims he dreamed the 48-star American flag one night in 1954 and he got up the next morning to paint it in all white – no red and blue, just white so the brush strokes had to indicate the stars and the stripes. Before he finished what became known at White Flag (1954-5), he dropped White Flag for Flag (1955), fully rendered in red, white and blue. White Flag didn’t suffer any run in the colors because there were no colors, just white. Flag, however, had a problem with the colors running and not drying fast enough. Johns reinvented a painting technique practiced in the Renaissance, called encaustics, a mix of hot molten wax and pigment. As the pigment impregnated wax cooled, it hardened and never ran.
Flag (1955) still hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, having been donated by architect Phillip Johnson. White Flag (1954-5) is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Together the two flag paintings probably make for the most important American paintings in the 20C. For the whole world in the 20C, it must be noted, Picasso’s Guernica is the most important. Johns worked real hard and created, sweated and agonized over the long days and nights he spent on Flag and White Flag.
On the other hand, in the late spring of 1937, Picasso read the newspaper account of the dive bombing of Guernica in the Basque area of Spain, got mad and all charged up and painted the century’s most important painting in about two weeks.
Guernica used to hang at the top of the stairs in the Museum of Modern Art until Franco died. Picasso died just a few years earlier, but his will was honored. Guernica returned to Spain in 1976 after the fascists fell. But for a long time both the most important American painting of the 20C and the world’s most important painting of the same century were seen and compared inside the same museum.
With all that history and art, the Museum of Modern Art makes for a great excuse to visit Manhattan most any time, but the Johns exhibition through September 1 is the only motivation I need.
I’ll make my usual list while there, but the other great reason to come to town is the U. S. Open, the tennis championships in Queens, the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs.
My NYC friend and I are meeting at the Museum of Modern Art at three o’clock Friday afternoon, so if anybody wants to walk it off with us, you’re invited. Call 803.394.5682.
On Saturday, we’ll be seated in the Arthur Ashe Stadium, section 327, row S, seats 8 & 9. Again, do drop in.
Saturday night we’ll be moving the conversation at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel, the world’s most glamorous. Try to find us there.
How are you getting there? Ever tried the train? I had my ticket from Florence Thursday night, expecting the northbound Amtrak about 11:00 p.m. I paid only $118 for the ride to NYC. For the return, I had my reservation to climb aboard around 11:00 a.m. Sunday, pulling into Columbia Monday morning, maybe one o’clock, all for $133.
So for about $250 I visited Manhattan. Not bad for travel arrangements made the day before departure. Keep in mind what you can do with the dozen hours going up and the dozen hours coming down: READ.
Reach Temple at – [email protected]
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