{"id":7162,"date":"2025-07-03T16:17:39","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T16:17:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/?p=7162"},"modified":"2025-07-07T23:22:23","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T23:22:23","slug":"jasper-johns-flags-a-lyrical-fourth-of-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/2025\/07\/03\/jasper-johns-flags-a-lyrical-fourth-of-july\/","title":{"rendered":"Jasper Johns\u2019 Flags: A Lyrical Fourth of July"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I don\u2019t know about you, but sometimes on the Fourth of July I\u2019d rather be in a cool museum than sweating on a picnic bench watching fireworks fizz like a clich\u00e9. And maybe that\u2019s why I think of Flag, that cool, waxy miracle Jasper Johns dreamed up in 1954. Not just a flag, the flag\u2014except it isn\u2019t waving or screaming, it’s sitting there, quiet and stubborn, painted in encaustic like a wound that won\u2019t quite scab over.<\/p>\n\n\n

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“White Flag” (1955):\u2028This painting is an all-white version of the American flag, challenging the viewer’s perception of the familiar symbol.\u00a0It’s a large-scale work that uses encaustic and collage, with newspaper and magazine clippings visible beneath the paint.\u00a0MET Museum’s collection.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Imagine dreaming the American flag and waking up to paint it. I mean, come on\u2014that\u2019s divine comedy and tragedy rolled into one. Johns didn\u2019t salute it or burn it\u2014he saw it. Not as a political banner, not even as pop, but as a thing you look at and then look again. And it keeps not being what you thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wax! That ancient method, borrowed from funerary portraits and bees, all thick with the smell of time. You get up close and you see bits of newspaper, headlines bleeding through the stripes like half-buried memories. And isn\u2019t that America too? Stuff we said yesterday, quietly fermenting under the red, white, and blue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Flag first showed its stars at Castelli\u2019s gallery, people didn\u2019t know whether to clap or protest. Was it art? Was it mockery? Was it too literal or too loaded? I mean, imagine painting the flag during the Cold War, in the age of conformity, while Pollock\u2019s drips were still drying and everyone was supposed to be Abstract with a capital A. Johns had the nerve to be clear.<\/p>\n\n\n

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“Flag” (1954-55):\u2028This encaustic on canvas painting, one of Johns’ earliest flag works, is a pivotal piece in his oeuvre.\u00a0It’s notable for its use of encaustic, a technique involving melted wax and pigment, which creates a textured, layered surface.\u00a0Johns himself has said that the idea for painting the flag came to him in a dream.\u00a0MoMA Museum’s collection.\u2028<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

And then there\u2019s White Flag\u2014that ghostly whisper of a country. All the symbolism drained of its color, but not its weight. Painted right after Flag, in 1955, it\u2019s not blank, it\u2019s blanched\u2014bleached by uncertainty, maybe even grief. You stand in front of it and it feels like something\u2019s missing and you\u2019re supposed to supply it. Like memory. Like conscience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And just when you think you\u2019ve got it, here come Three Flags in 1958, stacked like pancakes or propaganda, a recursion of stars and stripes shrinking into itself. A Matryoshka doll of patriotism! It\u2019s in the Whitney now, which feels just right\u2014it hums with all the layered complications of being American in a city that never quite agrees with itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johns didn\u2019t wave the flag, he interrogated it. With wax, with silence, with patience. He turned a familiar object into something so strange you had to start over. What is a flag, anyway? A symbol? A surface? A lie we all agree on?<\/p>\n\n\n

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“Three Flags” (1958):\u2028This work, also in encaustic and collage, presents the American flag in three layers, one on top of the other, creating a sense of depth and complexity.\u00a0Whitney Museum’s collection.\u00a0\u2028<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

It\u2019s funny how a painting can become iconic by depicting what\u2019s already iconic. But that\u2019s the trick, isn\u2019t it? Take something everyone thinks they understand\u2014like a Coke bottle, a soup can, or a flag\u2014and stare at it until it changes. Until you change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here\u2019s to Jasper Johns on this Independence Day, and the way he made us squint a little harder at what we thought was obvious. He gave us flags that don\u2019t wave, that don\u2019t shout. They wait. They keep their waxen silence while the rest of the world makes noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And somehow, that feels more American than fireworks.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t know about you, but sometimes on the Fourth of July I\u2019d rather be in a cool museum than sweating on a picnic bench watching fireworks fizz like a clich\u00e9. And maybe that\u2019s why I think of Flag, that cool, waxy miracle Jasper Johns dreamed up in 1954. Not just a flag, the flag\u2014except […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116342439,"featured_media":7164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28094],"tags":[177,12710,49557,678,4614,11420,200],"class_list":["post-7162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual-art","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-fine-art","tag-history","tag-new-york","tag-painting","tag-travel"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8lHqs-1Rw","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/artsolido.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/jasper-johns-22flag22-1954-55.jpg?fit=5352%2C3588&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116342439"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7162"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7173,"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7162\/revisions\/7173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsolido.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}