"Johns has assiduously avoided his public throughout his career, and yet he has also managed to consistently speak to what it is to be alive in America at any given moment. From his iconic paintings in the mid-50s of the American flag, which seemed to embody the fallout of Red Scare nationalism, to the modish apathy of his bronze sculptures of banal objects like flashlights and light bulbs, to his almost compulsive return in his later paintings to a holistic system of ambiguous symbols like galaxy spirals and cartoonish stick figures holding exaggeratedly large paintbrushes, he has been in a constant state of reinvention. He is the rare artist whose work has never become stale, who in his 80s is still creating strange and mysterious images that could be looked at endlessly and never fully reveal themselves. Whether Johns is actually about anything (or nothing) in particular has been the central question of his work, and yet it is ultimately less important than his endless search for meaning itself — the mere act of the lone artist entering the studio every day and deciding to continue. His constant presence is defined mostly by self-erasure, which has made him an artist who has disappeared almost entirely into his work. There is a sense that he’s been here forever, and that no one will replace him once he’s gone."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/t-magazine/jasper-johns.html
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