The Critical Reception of
Painted Bronze by Jasper Johns:
Art Posing as Product
As a Pop artist, Jasper Johns has produced art that has accommodated all
types of media, including sculpture, and is inclusive, relying upon extra-artistic
sources taken from popular culture (Alloway 119). At the same time his art can be
assessed as abstract and distinct from low art. Johns’ work has been celebrated
both for its critical content related to popular culture and for its formal innovations
distinct from subject matter. The opposing forces of the avant-garde approach with
appropriation from mass culture (following a process discussed by Walter Benjamin)
and self-referential modernist practice (exemplified by the criticism of Clement
Greenberg), in which formalism dominates as a concern, can be seen as a dialectic
for Johns. It must be viewed within the context of consumer society where art
poses as a product marketed in a commercialized art gallery system that professes
to assess value in tenns of the uniqueness of a work of art (Crow 215-16; Baudrillard
52). The critical reception of Johns’ early Pop art object Painted Bronze: Ballantine
Ale Cans (figure 1), a sculpture painted to resemble a consumer product, proves
the difficulties in trying to reconcile high art with mass culture'. For critics it was
expedient to avoid the question of originality — an issue raised by the appropriation
of an image from popular culture — by emphasizing the high prices the sculpture
commanded in the flourishing art market. A study of the criticism of Painted Bronze
will illustrate the way in which the early commerical success of the sculpture was
used for over four decades to show that the work had value as formally significant
modernist art.
In 1964 Johns recalled that he made Painted Bronze to resemble ale cans
in order to test his dealer Leo Castelli:
I heard a story about Willem de Kooning [that] he was annoyed
with my dealer Leo Castelli, for some reason, and said
something like, ‘That son of a bitch; you could give him two
beer cans and he could sell them. 1 heard this and thought, What
a sculpture—two beer cans. It seemed to me to fit in perfectly
with what 1 was doing, so 1did them and Leo sold them (qtd. in
Swenson 40-43).
The sculpture was purchased by Robert Scull for $960 and was later auctioned in