Statuesque at first, his inventions evolved into distant relatives of jellyfish and other denizens of the deep. Earlier, he tried his hand at the Surrealist game of inventing new life-forms. Since the late 1940s, Rothko had been filling his canvases with large, glowing expanses of colour. When Mark Rothko stopped by, he looked around at all the shamelessly recognisable imagery and said: “We worked for years to get rid of all that.” Few gallery debuts have been so applauded – and so disparaged. Next, he persuaded the architect Philip Johnson to buy the first Flag painting, with the understanding that he would eventually donate it to MoMA. The dealer could not afford to deprive his other clients of a chance to acquire work from what quickly came to be seen as the show of the year – 1958.Īlerted by a reproduction of Target with Four Faces on the cover of ARTnews, Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art made a long, contemplative visit and eventually approved three canvases for the collection. Furthermore, it would have been bad business. A taxi tycoon named Robert Scull wanted to buy everything on offer. And the Flags were covered edge to edge by the stars and stripes. Canvases called Targets bore patterns of concentric circles. There were gridded canvases, with each grid compartment filled by a letter of the alphabet or a number. Just over half a century ago, in the dead of a Manhattan winter, Leo Castelli gave Jasper Johns his first solo show.
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