- Museum number
- 1979,1006.20
- Title
- Object: Gray Alphabets
- Description
-
Abstract composition with repeated alphabet. 1968
Lithograph, printed in shades of grey
- Production date
- 1968
- Dimensions
-
Height: 1300 millimetres (plate)
-
Height: 1524 millimetres (sheet)
-
Width: 1066 millimetres
-
Width: 870 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- The back of the frame bears an exhibition label from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1971, Nov-Dec, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, 'Oversized Prints').
Text from Coppel, Daunt and Tallman, 'The American Dream: pop to the present', London: Thames and Hudson in association with the British Museum, 2017, cat. no. 19:
The colour grey is for Johns a persistent motif in and of itself, applied in paint and print to virtually every motif in his repertoire. It first appeared in a title in the 1956 painting 'Gray Alphabets' (The Menil Collection, Houston), whose composition and imposing scale are reiterated here: a 27 x 27 grid of rectangular boxes containing lowercase letters, a to z, in alphabetical order repeatedly. Because each row contains one more box than there are letters in the alphabet, things shift out of alignment: the rightmost letter of the top row is ‘z’, but the rightmost box of the second row is ‘a’ as the alphabet starts to wrap around on itself. If the letters were uniform in appearance, the pattern would be obvious – you would see a clear staircase of ‘p’s or ‘w’s marching upward and to the right – but the puddled ink and hollowed forms obfuscate and disrupt all simple readings.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1980 Jan.-May BM, 'American Prints 1879-1979', cat. no.117
2012 Apr-Aug, UAE, Abu Dhabi, Treasures
2017 9 Mar-18 Jun, London, BM, G30, The American Dream
2018 2 Jun-2 Sept, Paris, Fondation Custodia, The American Dream: pop to the present
2020-21 8 Oct-31 Jan, Madrid, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
2021 2 Mar-13 Jun, Barcelona, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
2021 13 Jul-14 Nov, Zaragoza, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
- Acquisition date
- 1979
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1979,1006.20