Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns was born in 1930, in Allendale, South Carolina. He is unquestionably one of the foremost artists in the world of contemporary art. He is a tireless searcher who from the outset reacted against Lyrical Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism and remained faithful to a kind of aestheticism, drawing his inspiration from the history of art. Driving back the limits of art, he has included his own roots and those of humanity in his work, together with his knowledge and his fondness for the past. To quote a reflection made by an art historian, he is one of the last American painters who has retained “the aroma of the old Europe”. Jasper Johns is recognised now as an indisputable, emblematic figure of art, and his work, which played a decisive role in the birth of Pop Art and its consequences, also lies at the origin of many other innovations in the world of art. Considered a promoter of Neo-Dada, he remains unclassifiable. Through his own creativity and the perfectionism which makes him such an extraordinary craftsman, Jasper Johns ceaselessly asks questions about the function of painting, the mediating role of a product that tries and touches the sensibility of the viewer. He is an indefatigable worker who possesses the impressive power of constantly questioning himself and the “feeling of a very profound order” that Eugène Delacroix describes in his Journal, which the artist needs “to maintain the originality of [his] thinking despite the habits to which talent is inclined to abandon itself”.