Jasper Johns, whose flags and targets still refuse to settle down

When the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao gathered nearly 140 works by Jasper Johns for the retrospective titled Night Driver, something odd happened to the flags. Seen in sequence across six decades — encaustic, oil, screenprint, sculpture, bronze — the American flag began to look less like a symbol of anything and more like a problem that Johns had been working through, patiently, with pigment and wire and wax, for his entire adult life. Which is, of course, exactly what he intended.

Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in Allendale, South Carolina, in the kind of childhood where he later said he had never seen a real work of art. He arrived in New York in 1952, enrolled briefly at Parsons, served two years in the U.S. Army stationed in Sendai, Japan, and returned to a city in the full grip of Abstract Expressionism. He destroyed his previous work and started again. The decision to paint the flag — which came to him, by his own account, in a dream — was not a retreat to the literal. It was a deliberate refusal of the heroic: instead of painting his interior, Johns would paint things that already had a meaning, then ask what it meant to paint them.

When Leo Castelli opened the show in January 1958, the Museum of Modern Art purchased four works before the doors closed. The flags were painted on newspaper in encaustic — layered, semi-transparent, with the texture of accumulated time visible in the wax — so that they were simultaneously a flag and unmistakably a painting of a flag. That double exposure, the thing and the picture of the thing occupying the same surface at the same moment, became the formal argument Johns would spend the rest of his career extending and complicating.

Through the early 1960s, Johns expanded the field of ready-made imagery to include maps of the United States, the alphabet, numerals, color charts, rulers, and Ballantine Ale cans cast in painted bronze. Painted Bronze (1960) produced genuine confusion about whether it was sculpture, painting, or product — which was the point. Map (1961) applied the same logic to national geography: utterly identifiable, suddenly strange. Johns was also becoming one of the most serious printmakers in American art, working in lithography, screenprint, and etching with technical rigor that pushed the medium further than most painters bothered.

The consistent misreading of Johns is that his work is cold, ironic, detached — a thinking artist’s distance from feeling. The Guggenheim Bilbao retrospective takes its title, Night Driver, from a 1960 drawing that Johns has described as the first work based on a personal feeling: the loneliness of a long nocturnal drive, visibility reduced to what the headlights reveal. The crosshatch paintings that dominated his practice from 1972 to 1983, and that Gagosian surveyed in the 2026 New York exhibition Between the Clock and the Bed, were partly triggered by a glimpse of a pattern on a passing car during another drive. The impersonal-looking, mathematically precise surface of those paintings conceals an autobiography — of grief, of estrangement from his longtime collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, of time and mortality — that Johns has consistently declined to explain in public. His reticence is not detachment. It is a different kind of exposure.

In the spring of 2026, Gagosian and David Zwirner both presented major exhibitions of Johns’s work in New York: Between the Clock and the Bed, a crosshatch survey at 980 Madison Avenue through April, and Copy/Trace at West 20th Street, which traced the role of repetition and reproduction in his works on paper across five decades. The Guggenheim Bilbao retrospective, Night Driver, opened in May and continues through October 2026 — the most comprehensive presentation of his work in Europe in a generation.

For much of his working life, Johns has been based in Sharon, Connecticut, in a converted studio that functions partly as a laboratory, partly as an archive. He has given relatively few interviews and declined the retrospective memoir that publishers have periodically proposed. His longstanding creative dialogue with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham — which produced cover designs, stage sets, and a sustained conversation about chance, structure, and what images do when placed in time — was one of the most consequential cross-disciplinary exchanges in postwar American art.

The Guggenheim Bilbao retrospective closes in October 2026. At ninety-five, Jasper Johns is still working in the Connecticut studio. Whatever comes next will probably look like something you’ve already seen.

Tags: art, artists, painters, American artists, Between the Clock and the Bed, Flag

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