- Museum number
- 2020,7024.1
- Title
- Object: Flags I
- Description
-
Double image of the flag of the United States of America, oriented side-ways so the stripes of each flag are vertical and the stars are in the upper left. 1973
Colour screenprint
- Production date
- 1973
- Dimensions
-
Height: 675 millimetres (image)
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Height: 699 millimetres (sheet)
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Width: 850 millimetres
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Width: 889 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- The flag of the United States has been a recurring motif in the work of Jasper Johns. He first used it for a painting titled 'Flag' in 1954 (now the Museum of Modern Art, New York). He made this print at Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island, New York, using 15 colours and 30 different screens. A screened layer of glossy varnish distinguishes the flag on the right from the matt flag on the left. It echoes the effect of a painting that he made in the same year, which paired a flag painted in oil paint with one in the wax-based medium encaustic.
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. 16:
No motif is more closely associated with Johns than the American flag, which he first painted in 1954. The baffling literalism of that painting, 'Flag' (Museum of Modern Art, New York) – is it a thing or a picture of a thing? – suggested both the knowing mundaneness of Dada and the homespun naïveté of folk art. Since then, Johns has painted, drawn and cast the flag; rendered it in eye-popping colour and in spectral white; described its forty-eight-star configuration and its fifty-star version. (The stars in the American flag represent the states; the design of the flag was changed in 1959 after Alaska and Hawaii were granted statehood.) Though not oblivious to its symbolism, Johns saw the flag as one of those familiar things that is ‘seen and not looked at’. (Jasper Johns in Max Kozloff, 'Jasper Johns', New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967, p. 15.) Johns has described screenprinting as ‘simpleminded’, (Jasper Johns in the film 'Hanafuda/Jasper Johns' by Katy Martin, 1978–81.) and the bright colours, hard edges and commercial associations that drew pop artists to the medium in the 1960s held little appeal for him. Working with the Japanese printers at Simca Print Artists in New York in the 1970s, however, he discovered that multiple layers of transparent inks could produce images of a delicacy and sophistication that, Johns quipped, ‘might properly be considered an abuse of the medium’. (Ibid.) From a distance, 'Flags I' is a large, brash rendition of the stars and stripes; up close it dissolves into a forest of individual marks printed in fifteen colours from thirty different screens. An additional screen of glossy varnish distinguishes the flag on the right from the matt flag on the left, echoing the effect of a painting made the same year, which paired a flag painted in oil paint with one in encaustic. Made nearly twenty years after Johns’ first flag painting, 'Flags I' confronts the viewer with an almost perfect symbiosis of the utterly straightforward and the impossibly complex.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
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
- 2020
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2020,7024.1
- Additional IDs
-
Other BM number: 2016,AFBMLoan,42.1 (AFBM loan number)