Jasper Johns - Love At First License Plate Map of America

When I went to MoMa, on a Target Free Friday no less in January, I had the chance to catch "Focus: Jasper Johns", showcasing 87 paintings, drawings, and prints from MoMa's permanent collection. It was organized by Deborah Wye (chief curator of prints & illustrated books). Hard to imagine, but Jasper Johns is actually still living (American, born 1930) and the exhibit serves as an "investigation and reinvestigation of a repertoire of motifs" and it examines "thematic imagery and highlights ways in which his inventive re engagement with it creates a sense of metamorphosis and shifting meaning in his work".

I thoroughly enjoyed all of the prints which "has served as the artists investigatory process especially well. Thoroughly exploring the intricacies of the medium, he has gleaned new directions for his art from its many possibilities".

The quotes on the wall I agree with. I love just the mass proliferation of differences that occur when an artist does prints. I could go on for days about printmaking and even the history of movable type - but what is pertinent to my admiration of said medium holds true for the exhibit. Johns is able to create copious amounts of prints, but all with different souls. Yes, they did come from some form of a carbon copy, but each print amasses something that is all its own. Ah, I love prints, they're so entertaining and so much fun to make. It's just the big rubber stamp that you came home with when you were little that had your name on it, and you would dip it into the rainbow ink pad and stamp it across tattered and special pieces of paper. Um, well maybe not everyone did that - but I sure did.

In the NYT review:

• It has commonly been supposed that Mr. Johns picked motifs that were relatively empty of meaning so that he could focus without distraction on abstract forms and technical processes. So, in many prints in the exhibition representing the numbers 0 through 9, we study the exquisite sensitivity with which Mr. Johns makes lines, washes and colors cohere into chunky, rounded numerals.

Oh goodness, I had like a mini-heart attack when I saw all those numbers. I liked all the various ways in which he used just simple numbers to create a series of depth. Great art is usually simple - take one thing, do it a bunch of times, call it a day. Johns achieves such a thing.

• Why is this image so compelling for Mr. Johns that he returns to it over and over? You could say he’s just practicing the art of self-branding, which he has been enormously successful at. But you may also note that it’s an image of many different things contained by one thing — another metaphor, perhaps, of the multiple self contained by one psyche.

Yes - it sure does. It captured me, mind, body and soul. Kind of an exaggeration but I had no idea what was going on at the MoMa until I went. So I will have to say with it being my last visit to MoMa in quite a few months, great exhibit.