Jasper Johns: Flag

Jasper Johns (American, ), *Flag,* 1954, Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels, Image Source: MoMA

“It all began…with my painting a picture of an American flag,” Johns remarked in 1959 in reference to this work. Flag was made on a cut bedsheet using oil paint and then encaustic, a method involving pigmented melted wax. Johns dipped strips of cloth and newsprint into the hot wax and then affixed them to the sheet to fill in a penciled outline of the flag. The result is a picture whose process is registered on its surface, a focus on materiality at odds with the expressionistic gestures dominant in painting at the time of Flag’s making.”

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