Peter Schjeldahl: String Theory

In many ways, we still inhabit an art world that he inaugurated in the late nineteen-fifties, along with his ally Robert Rauschenberg and, not least, their dealer, Leo Castelli. The eureka moment came in 1954, when, at the age of twenty-four, Johns made a strong, delicate painting that didn’t just represent but, when you thought about it, was the American flag—a sign the same as what it signified. By taking an object from the realm of common fact—as he did throughout the fifties and early sixties, with paintings of targets, numbers, maps, and more flags—and then returning it to that realm transfigured, he rescued art from the endgames of modern art, including lately played-out Abstract Expressionism. His breakthrough democratized art’s worldly estate, projecting a sensibility at once public and private, high and low, and bohemian and bourgeois.

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The 1954-55 “Flag” changed the way educated people from then on would look at any painting—as a thing as well as a picture. Like a prophetic Rosetta stone, it correlated terms that, several years later, would define both Pop art and minimalism: universal subject, irreducible form. Timing made Johns appear to be a demiurgic agent of titanic social and artistic changes that were going to occur in any event. Such a crusading posture—which came naturally to Rauschenberg, as it did to Jackson Pollock and, later, to Andy Warhol—scarcely befitted Johns, who had been, as he essentially remains, a shy, self-absorbed collagist and a poetry-reading, intellectual gamesman influenced by the koanlike musical conundrums of John Cage.