It is through the use of monochromatic gray that Johns achieves the ultimate act of negation and conclusively declares the ‘objectness’ of his paintings, here amplified by the stark materiality of the additional canvas construction which is mounted to the surface support. Formally, the painting’s execution echoes the use of canvas collage in the 1958 Tennyson, held in the collection of the Des Moines Art Center. Exemplary of the artist’s perpetual variability within abstraction, the sensational drama of Disappearance I summarizes the artist’s pursuit toward pure literalness through an exceptionally sumptuous surface of gray encaustic. Throughout the early part of his career, Johns explored the artistic possibilities presented by the trinity of red, yellow and blue, complemented by glorious works that resound in one color the fusion of both ends of the chromatic spectrum – gray. ![]() In his ceaselessly inventive and remarkably challenging body of work, Johns has categorically distanced himself from interpretation for him, a work should negate fixed meaning and elude facility of analysis. The vehement motion of Johns’ brushstrokes impel a substantial spontaneity, however restrained by the square monochrome format. Each swoop of thick black, white, and gray that emerges from the surface’s flurry of activity ineffably and incontrovertibly confirms the artist's painterly genius. Thoughtful, deliberate, and earth-shatteringly moving, we stand enraptured before the painting’s astonishing ambition, sensational clarity, and sobering gravity. While Johns initially proposed making four Disappearance paintings, the artist only completed two – the later Disappearance II is today in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Toyama. Here, with a plane of raw, trimmed canvas collaged onto the surface, Johns’ painting is at its most explicitly self-referential, turning itself inward to reveal the machinations of its own making. In a career that spans more than a half century, works of this size and significance from this remarkable early period are notoriously rare as fundamental exemplars of the practice that would cause an emboldened revolution in the medium. With every sumptuous inflection of paint, Disappearance I reveals a hushed accumulation of gestures-each stroke meets a dead end and a fresh start. ![]() ![]() 99).Ī critical touchstone of Jasper Johns’ radically influential body of work, Disappearance I of 1960 is as beautiful as it is provocative in its profound candor. ![]() You may have to choose how to respond and you may respond in a limited way, but you have been aware that you are alive” (Johns cited in exhibition catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, 1997 , p. “I think that one wants from painting a sense of life…One wants to be able to use all of one’s facilities, when one looks at a picture, or at least to be aware of all of one’s facilities in all aspects of one’s life… like we were saying a while ago, a surprise.
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