Jasper Johns: Phaidon Focus

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is widely considered among the foremost artists of the American post-war period. Beginning his career in New York when the scene was dominated by the formidable paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, Johns forged a unique aesthetic path that helped to set the stage for many of the major movements that followed, including Pop Art and Conceptualism. 

This richly illustrated survey spans Johns's prolific career, ranging from the early images of lags and targets - which established his reputation as a radical innovator in the mid 1950s, and have since become icons of twentieth century art - to the compelling compositions of the recent Catenary series. The latter testify to Johns's continuing artistic ambition at the start of the twenty-first century. As Wallace demonstrates, by casting a critical eye on the concept of pictorial representation, Johns has consistently challenged artistic conventions, in the process revitalizing painting for an era that was quick to proclaim its obsolescence. 

Isabelle Loring Wallace is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens. Her research attends to broad philosophical questions about the nature of representation and subjectivity, and her publications have covered a wide range of artists and objects in an effort to address these issues: Edouard Manet, Marcel Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Paul Pfeiffer, Steven Meisel and, most intensively, Jasper Johns. Wallace is co-editor, with Jennifer Hirsh, of Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (2011), and with Nora Wendl, of Architectural Strategies in Contemporary Art (2013).