Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930) Map, 1962

The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens Jasper Johns: Gray today, February 5, and is the first exhibition to examine the use of the color gray in the work of American artist Jasper Johns.

From the mid-1950s to the present, gray has been a consistent thread in Johns’s practice and an important means for the artist to evoke different moods and to explore a range of formal ideas. This major exhibition offers a new lens through which to see the work of this pivotal American artist, bringing together more than 120 paintings, reliefs, drawings, prints, and sculptures. Jasper Johns: Gray features masterworks of Johns’s career — such as Canvas, Gray Target, Jubilee, 0 through 9, No, Diver, and The Dutch Wives — as well as works from the artist’s recent Catenary series and new works never before exhibited.

The exhibition examines the use of the color gray by the American artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) between the mid-1950s and the present. Johns has worked in gray, at times to evoke a mood, at other times to evoke an intellectual rigor that results from his purging most color from his works.

One of the most important American painters and printmakers of the 20th century, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) emerged in the 1950s as a leading artist of the generation that followed “The New York School” of Abstract Expressionists. This exhibition is the first to focus on Johns’s varied use of gray, tracing the progression of this color throughout the work and highlighting its appearance in diverse media, such as encaustic, oil paint, Sculp-metal, aluminum, silver, lead, graphite, charcoal, and ink. As early as 1955, Johns was working in gray and finding infinite variety within a narrow color spectrum. With gray in particular, Johns’s sensuous, layered surfaces emphasize the physical properties of the work. The exhibition also focuses on the intellectual and emotional significance of gray in Johns’s work, and how it has varied over the past five decades.

On exhibit now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1000 Fifth Avenue.
Exhibition Dates: February 5 – May 4, 2008. Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, 2nd floor
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ON A SIDE NOTE

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