Jasper Johns
Birth Date: May 15, 1930

Artist Gallery
Born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930, Jasper Johns grew up in South Carolina, with no formal art training.  Johns’ early life had humble beginnings. His parents divorced shortly after his birth and, as a result, Johns grew up living with relatives in various towns across his home state of South Carolina. He attended the University of South Carolina from September 1947 until December 1948, where his instructors included Catherine Rembert, Augusta Rembert Wittkowsky Walsh, and Edmund Yaghjian, all of whom encouraged him to go to New York. Heeding their advice, Johns headed north; arriving in the city, he enrolled in standard introductory art classes at the Parsons School of Design and visited the array of museums and galleries before being drafted for military service. He was stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and in Japan, and was discharged in 1952. Painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Johns became one of America's best-known post-Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists.  His name is most associated with pictorial images of flags and numbers. Unlike Abstract Expressionism, these signature works seem removed from the artist's emotions.  They are modernist in that they lack traditional perspective, focusing on inter-relationships of color and shapes, but are realist in that they have recognizable subject matter. Johns work was affected by his friendships with dancer Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, and artist Robert Rauschenberg. Over the next few years Johns used the same approach with other images that were traditional symbols.  In 1956 to 1957, he added numbers to his paintings and in 1960, he executed his first lithographs.  In 1959 his work became increasingly abstract, influenced by Surrealism and Dadaism, with surfaces complicated by combining bold colors with letters and other symbols, some of them obvious, such as maps, and others hard to read.  He created assemblage, and from 1972, used a cross-hatching method. In 1997, a major retrospective of 225 of Johns' work was held in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Kirk Varnedoe. Arguably one of the most famous living American artist, Jasper Johns has built an extraordinary career around the most ordinary subject matter, pursuing and presenting iconic imagery based on familiar objects. Since the late 1990s, Johns has been working from a restored barn near Sharon, Connecticut and pursues a hobby of raising bees.