The Slates's Targeting Jasper Johns by Christopher Benfey (http://www.slate.com/id/2158600/)

There are no American flags in the Jasper Johns exhibition at the National Gallery, no painted maps or bronzed ale cans. Targets are the theme, and Target is the sponsor. The first room looks like a shooting gallery. The two big targets of 1955, one with four plaster faces arrayed in boxes and one with miscellaneous body parts, are right in range. The Museum of Modern Art owns one of these trophy pictures, and David Geffen owns the other; a revelation when they were first exhibited and understood as "cool" rejections of emotive Abstract Expressionism, they now look stiff and forlorn hanging on the wall. The organizers of the show want us to take a fresh look at Johns' greatest decade of work, 1955 to 1965. What Johns was up to, they argue, is an ongoing "Allegory of Painting," as targets yielded to related motifs. In other words, this is art about art, just as critics back in the 1970s argued that Hitchcock's films were really about shooting movies. (Come to think of it, Johns' four faces may recall Mount Rushmore, with Cary Grant hanging on for dear life in North by Northwest.) But why targets? Take a closer look at the upper right corner, under the fourth nose, for a possible clue.

Jasper Johns, Target With Four Faces, 1955 © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York. Image © Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NewYork, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

"History and Biography": The words are clearly legible under the thick, red encaustic, the primitive medium of melted wax and pigment that Johns used instead of oil paint. Johns, the great sphinx of Modernism, won't tell you what they mean. "A painting," he once said, "should be looked at the same way we look at a radiator." (But how exactly do we look at a radiator?) His explanation for why he uses targets and maps and flags is the same as George Mallory's for climbing Mount Everest: because they're there. He told art critic David Sylvester, "I am interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality." OK, what was the world up to in 1955? Johns was drafted into the Army in the spring of 1951 and was stationed first at Fort Jackson, S.C., and then, from December 1952 until May 1953, in Sendai, Japan. In a smart catalog essay, minimalist sculptor and critic Robert Morris observes, "The military environment is characterized by the impersonal, the anonymous, and the insistently repetitious. Targets, flags, numbers, and maps form a ubiquitous set of iconic signs within the closed military environment." For Morris, Johns is the painter of Cold War militarism. So much for history. What about biography?

Jasper Johns, detail from Target With Four Faces, 1955 © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York. Image © Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Voilà. In tracing what he calls the "internal logic" of Johns' art, National Gallery curator Jeffrey Weiss notes that he progressed from painting targets to using a mechanical, target-making "device." This was Johns' word for the yardsticks and other straightedges that he screwed to the wooden support and used like a compass to scrape circular expanses of paint. Good Time Charley, in the doleful signature gray that came to dominate many of Johns' most affecting paintings, demonstrates how a seemingly mechanical procedure can have unexpected emotional results. The scraped expanse of paint is more evocative than the splotchy remainder of the picture. The inverted tin cup, with its ironic inscription, implies poverty and need. The whole contraption looks like a bell. It tolls for thee. For those open to a possible biographical agenda for this grim image, Johns' intense relationship with Robert Rauschenberg, which began in 1954, collapsed in 1961, the year in which Johns painted this and several other memorably melancholy works.

Jasper Johns, Good Time Charley, 1961 © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York. Image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Voilà. In tracing what he calls the "internal logic" of Johns' art, National Gallery curator Jeffrey Weiss notes that he progressed from painting targets to using a mechanical, target-making "device." This was Johns' word for the yardsticks and other straightedges that he screwed to the wooden support and used like a compass to scrape circular expanses of paint. Good Time Charley, in the doleful signature gray that came to dominate many of Johns' most affecting paintings, demonstrates how a seemingly mechanical procedure can have unexpected emotional results. The scraped expanse of paint is more evocative than the splotchy remainder of the picture. The inverted tin cup, with its ironic inscription, implies poverty and need. The whole contraption looks like a bell. It tolls for thee. For those open to a possible biographical agenda for this grim image, Johns' intense relationship with Robert Rauschenberg, which began in 1954, collapsed in 1961, the year in which Johns painted this and several other memorably melancholy works.

Jasper Johns, Good Time Charley, 1961 © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York. Image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Among these is Painting Bitten by a Man, which looks a lot like John Pasche's 1971 "tongue and lip" logo for the Rolling Stones, often misattributed to Andy Warhol. Here the encaustic is so thick and drippy it resembles cake frosting, and maybe that inspired Johns to take a real bite out of it. The painting is quite small, roughly 9 inches by 7, and oddly luminous. It's also sensuous. The joking title is probably meant to hide these qualities. To me, the picture is among the most moving in the whole exhibition, a lonely cry for love, and I can see why Johns held on to it. The picture is painted on a type plate, the kind of thing that used to hold typeface letters for printing. Weiss thinks this is another of Johns' attempts to reduce painting to quasi-mechanical operations.

Jasper Johns, Painting Bitten by a Man, 1961 © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York. Image courtesy the artist and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Around 1962, Johns began using his own body as an instrument for printing. He covered his face and hands in baby oil and pressed them against a sheet of paper, then sprinkled the residue with charcoal. The result in this case looks like Munch's The Scream or a still from Home Alone. In the margin, Johns typed an enigmatic poem of Frank O'Hara's, which begins with these lines: "The clouds go soft/ change color and so many kinds/ puff up, disperse/ sink into the sea." There's a back-to-basics feel to these images as well as a return to childhood, via finger painting and baby oil. But the O'Hara poem suggests another direction: down into the sea.

Jasper Johns, Skin With O'Hara Poem, 1963/1965 © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York. Photograph by Ric Blanc © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In Periscope (Hart Crane), the straightedge "device" has sprouted a hand, and it looks as though the periscope is opening onto the blue sea, helpfully labeled "BLUE" in the lower panel. A black arrow on the right points downward. In Pictures of Nothing, his posthumously published lectures on abstract painting at the National Gallery, Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, mentions Johns' "title mania." Doesn't the title encourage us to think of Hart Crane's suicidal dive into the Gulf of Mexico in 1932, after he was beaten up for coming on to a crew member? Doesn't that extended hand suggest a crucifix, an image, presumably, of gay martyrdom? But Weiss—and probably Johns, too—will have none of this. The periscope is a mechanical device, like the compass and quadrant that Crane mentions in his poem At Melville's Tomb. The painting, Weiss argues, is really about "the compound relationship between instrument and body," which in turn "recalls the Target paintings with plaster casts."

Jasper Johns, Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963 © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York. Image courtesy the artist, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Weiss and his team at the National Gallery are on to something. With a limited set of mechanically impersonal means—a target shape, a compasslike device, body prints, and stenciled color names—Johns has created an amazing range of images. But when we arrive at Johns' extraordinary drawing Diver, the sense of tragedy is unavoidable. We seem to be on deck, or rather the drawing is a wooden deck, with the footprints of a previous diver imprinted on the top of the sheet. This enormous picture seems more carved than drawn. The outstretched arms have hands at both ends, like some strange divinity of pure grasping or reaching. Maybe in a few years, when Johns' prohibitions have waned and it no longer seems reactionary to look for cultural or personal meanings in abstract art, we will be able to speak openly about the deep emotional impact of pictures like Diver. It makes me think of Gauguin's sculptures, with their deliberate attempt to cut to something more primal in human experience. Maybe Japan, which has always been important to Johns, helped him enter this spiritual domain. Johns returned to Japan in 1964, where he made a series of pared-down prints and drawings, in one of which he prints four injunctions in four adjacent boxes: "cut, tear, scrape, erase."

Jasper Johns, Diver, 1962-1963 © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photograph © Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. Image courtesy MoMA, New York, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

There is always this conflict in Johns, between the operatically expressive (cut, tear) and the extinction (scrape, erase) of personality. As another member of the cult of impersonality, T.S. Eliot, once wrote: "Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." Johns tends to make drawings after paintings, reversing the usual process, and some of his drawings, to my eye, are the most arresting expressions of this inner conflict. The small drawings he did of targets are a revelation; no larger than 6 inches square, they are lively, intense, and full of mystery. Unlike the primary colors of the painted targets, the drawings are monochrome: gray, green, white. They look like mandalas, or rubbings of Cambodian temple fragments. The target is almost invisible, pulsing in and out of focus as one looks at, or into, the image. There's a Zen feel to it, as though you yourself are dissolving into the target. "The hits on the target are only the outward proof and confirmation of your purposelessness at its highest, of your egolessness, your self-abandonment," the master tells his pupil in Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery. Close your eyes. See the target. The target is within you.

Jasper Johns, Green Target, 1958 © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York. Image courtesy Barbara Bertozzi Caste