Jasper Johns’ P a in ted B ron ze
61
are repeated in the most recent criticism; however the autobiographical reviews
ignore the issue of appropriation from mass culture and prize originality, reducing
each new work to an insular product of the artist’s creative genius.
The criticism demonstrates that the early work by Jasper Johns remains
engaging. The critical reception of his art from the early 1960s on is equally
instructive for examining the significance of the art market and for ascertaining
the surrender by critics to the physical presence and form of Painted Bronze as an
art object evaluated as merely posing as a commercial product.
Nicholls State University
Deborah H. Cibelli
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Johns selected the subject o f Painted Bronze: Ballantine Ale Cans in 1960, a year
before Andy Warhol used Campbell Soup cans in his paintings. See Bernstein 55.
The auction prompted Ivan Karp to say o f Scull: “The man’s visual involvement was
really there- you can't take that away from him- but he behaved toward art the same
way he behaved toward his taxi business. There was always a contest about the price,
and he would take a long period o f time to pay.” Quoted in Tomkins 61.
For trompe I'oeil, still life and vanitas themes in Johns' oeuvre from the 1960s, see
Bernstein 74-89, 111.
James Rosenquist, who arrived at art from advertising, addressed appropriation: I think
we have a free society, and the action that goes on in this free society allows
encroachments, as a commercial society. So I geared myself, like an advertiser or a
large company, to this visual inflatioi>— in commercial advertising which is one o f the
foundations o f our society. I'm living in it, and it has such impact and excitement in its
means o f im ageiy See Huyssen 261.
K ozloff stated: “To have seen Johns in his studio, as I once did, [notes Kozloff]
laboriously painting the Ballantine label on a bronze cylinder, using an actual label as
his ‘life' model, is to have the point apparently confirmed” (qtd. in Crichton 43).
Paintings depicting brushes and paint include Field Painting, 1963-64; Studio, 1964;
Eddingsville, 1965 and Decoy, 1971. Decoy was also used as the basis for a lithograph
closely reproducing the Ballantine ale cans. The ale can reproduced in the lithograph is
a closed can measuring 4 Vt inches while the height o f the actual can made as part o f
the sculpture is 4 '/: inches.
Johns, quoted in Bernstein, said o f Painted Bronze:
You have a model and you paint a thing to be very close to the model.
Then you have the possibility o f completely fooling the situation,
making one exactly like the other, which doesn’t particularly interest
me. (In that case you lose the fact o f what you have actually done)...I
like that there is the possibility that one might take one for the other,
but I also like that with a little examination, it’s very clear that one is
not the other (54).