Few critics have engaged with Jasper Johns’ work as deeply or as persistently as Robert Storr. Focal Points, a new collection of essays, articles, and reviews, brings together decades of Storr’s incisive writing on the American painter, offering readers a rare glimpse into the mind of an artist who reshaped Postwar Art.
Expertly edited by art historian Francesca Pietropaolo and richly illustrated, the volume distils Storr’s dialogue with Johns’ practice—one that began in late 1960s New York, when the critic first encountered the artist.
Johns, of course, needs no introduction. His encaustic renditions of flags, targets, and numbers in the 1950s disrupted the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, carving a path toward Pop while resisting easy categorisation. Storr’s essays avoid retrospective mythmaking, instead tracing the evolution of Johns’ work with a scholar’s precision and a critic’s intuition. What emerges is an analysis of individual pieces and a meditation on how meaning is constructed—and destabilised—through art.
Pietropaolo’s introduction underscores the singular nature of Storr’s approach: his commitment to “close looking” and “prolonged thinking” reveals layers in Johns’ oeuvre that might otherwise go unnoticed. The result is a book that balances scholarly rigour with accessible prose, making it essential for seasoned art historians and those newly drawn to Johns’ enigmatic world. In an era of fleeting interpretations, Focal Points reminds us that great criticism, like great art, demands time, patience, and curiosity.
Emerging from the shadow of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns forged a new visual language that upended conventions and redefined the boundaries of painting. Born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in rural South Carolina, Johns’ early isolation cultivated a quiet intensity—an artist more inclined to question than proclaim. After a brief stint at the University of South Carolina, he moved to New York in 1949, drifting through odd jobs before encountering Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage, figures who would profoundly shape his thinking.
John’s breakthrough came with his Flag (1954-55), a radical meditation on symbols so familiar they had become invisible. Rendered in encaustic—an ancient medium of pigmented wax—the work neither celebrated nor critiqued its subject but suspended it in poetic ambiguity. Was this a painting of a flag or a flag as a painting? Such paradoxes became his hallmark. His Targets, Numbers, and Maps similarly transformed mundane imagery into layered puzzles, inviting viewers to confront the gap between perception and meaning. – PCR
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