Jasper Johns: A Retrospective

Jasper Johns's art unites mastery, mystery, simplicity, and contradiction. His methodical working process combines intense deliberation and experimentation, obsessive craft, cycles of revision and repetition, and decisive shifts of direction. Johns also frequently borrows images from other artists, which, ironically, only underscores the originality of his own vision. His work occupies a key position in the art of the second half of the twentieth century. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective is the most complete and authoritative resource on it available, containing 264 color plates illustrating his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Accompanying essays review his essential themes, analyze his references to other artists, and explore how his contemporaries have, in turn, seen and absorbed his own work. The plates are arranged to follow the stages of his career, allowing comparison of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from each period, as his style developed and changed. That comprehensive selection of reproductions is interwoven with an illustrated chronology tracing Johns' life and work with unprecedented accuracy and thoroughness. With its scholarly essays and extensive bibliography, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective is the indispensable reference work on this crucial artist. This volume was originally published to accompany the major exhibition of Johns' work held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1996 and 1997, his first full retrospective in 20 years. It has been out of print since 2002.