Cicada
24 x 19 inchesCicada II
(ULAE 214), 1981
paper: 24 x 19 inches
frame: 26 3/8 x 21 inches
Edition: 50 + 10 AP's, 3 PP's
Signed & dated in pencil "J Johns 79-81" lower right, numbered lower left.
Printed by Kenjiro Nonaka, Hiroshi Kawanishi, Takeshi Shimada
Published by Jasper Johns and Simca Print Artists, Inc., 1981
© 2024 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Literature
Judith Goldman, Jasper Johns Prints 1977-1981, Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, MA, 1981, n.p., Segal 28, another impression reproduced full page black and white.
Riva Castleman Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective, New York: The Museum of Modern Art; Boston: New York Graphic Society, Books/Little Brown and Company, 1986, pg 123, another impression reproduced in color.
Richard Field, The Prints of Jasper Johns 1960-1993: A Catalogue Raisonne, ULAE, New York, 1994, Jasper Johns Cicada II (ULAE 214), 1981, Catalogue Reference ULAE 214, n.p., another impression reproduced in full-page color.
Elizabeth Armstrong, Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, Walker Art Center, 1990, pgs. 58-59, another impression reproduced in full-page color.
Dana Miller, Adam D. Weinberg & Donna De Salvo, Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011, p 333, another impression reproduced in color.
Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns The Screenprints, Fisher Landau Center, 1996, plate 18, n.p., another impression reproduced in color.
Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns: Redo an Eye, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2017, figure 7.26, pg. 207, another impression reproduced.
Exhibited
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective, May 19–Aug 19, 1986, another impression exhibited.
Walker Art Center, Minnesota, Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, February 18-May 13, 1990, another impression exhibited.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, June 17-August 19, 1990, another impression exhibited.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Fransisco, San Francisco, Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, September 15-November 18, 1990, another impression exhibited.
Montreal Museum of Art, Montreal, Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, December 14, 1990-March 10, 1991, another impression exhibited.
Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, April 6-May 27, 1991, another impression exhibited.
Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, June 22-August 18, 1991, another impression exhibited.
The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, September 14-November 10, 1991, another impression exhibited.
Selected Museum Collections
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
The Broad Collection, Los Angeles
Beginning with his 1972 painting Untitled, Jasper Johns developed his motif of crosshatched lines, experimenting with colors, patterns, mirroring and reversals. According to the artist, the inspiration for his crosshatched works came from a pattern he glimpsed on a car that quickly passed him on a highway, "I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me – literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning." Over the next ten years, Johns produced many variations on the crosshatch theme in paintings, drawings and prints.
JASPER JOHNS CICADA
Beginning with his 1972 painting Untitled, Jasper Johns developed his motif of crosshatched lines, experimenting with colors, patterns, mirroring and reversals. According to the artist, the inspiration for his crosshatched works came from a pattern he glimpsed on a car that quickly passed him on a highway, "I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me – literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning." Over the next ten years, Johns produced many variations on the crosshatch theme in paintings, drawings and prints.
With his Cicada prints, Johns sought to evoke a. New form, one that is growing and splitting in new visual directions. "The Cicada title has to do with the image of something bursting through its skin, which is what they do. You have all those shells where the back splits and they've emerged. And basically that kind of splitting form is what I tried to suggest." Johns illustrated this splitting by employing lines of primary and secondary colors. In Cicada (ULAE 204) a screenprint from 1979, the lines in the central area are red, yellow and blue while the lines at the outer edges are orange, green and violet.
Throughout his career, Johns experimented with showing the same idea differently, repeating forms and motifs in various media. As evidenced by his work from the 1970s and early 1980s, the crosshatch motif lent itself exceptionally well to this working method. Printmaking allowed Johns to elaborate on his compositional ideas and his printmaking influenced his painting just as much as his paintings influenced his prints. In fact, the use of crosshatching in both prints and paintings is significant. Johns has taken a technique historically used in drawing and printmaking to evoke shade and depth, making it the subject of his work.
“Johns first encountered the art of Edvard Munch at age twenty when he visited the 1950 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. But it was some twenty-five to thirty years later that Johns began to mine Munch’s work for inspiration, studying his innovative techniques and signature themes of love, loss, sex, and death. These aspects of Munch’s approach may have gained increasing resonance for Johns as he passed the milestone age of fifty and as the AIDS crisis worsened.” -John B. Ravenal
The story of Johns's engagement with Munch's work deepened, paradoxically, during the ten-year period when the abstract motif of crosshatching became the exclusive subject of Johns's paintings. Crosshatching first appeared in the painting Untitled, 1972, where it fills the far left panel of a four-part work. Johns described the source for this pattern during a 1976 interview with Michael Crichton: "I was riding in a car, going out to the Hamptons for the weekend, when a car came in the opposite direction. It was covered with these marks, but I only saw it for a moment-then it was gone—just a brief glimpse. But I immediately thought that I would use it for my next painting. Johns later added to the account: "It had all the qualities that interest me literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of complete lack of meaning." Despite its specificity, the crosshatch story obscures as much as it reveals. No date has ever been fixed for when Joins obeserved the decorated car, and thus we do not know how long the motif percolated in his mind becoming more "his" than "taken" before he used it. In addition, the serendipitous nature of the story sidesteps the fact that hatch marks and crosshaching would already have been very familiar to Johns as an acclaimed draftsmen and printmaker; from the Middle Ages onward these techniques were casic means in the graphic arts for rendering light and shade and creating the illusion of three dimensions. Seeing the pattern on the car, then, was a moment more of recognition than of discovery-that a fundamental unit of his existing artistic vocabulary could be isolated and elevated as an analog to the flags, maps, numbers, and letters he previously sourced out in the world.
The condition of Jasper Johns prints plays a pivotal role in preserving the integrity and value of these artworks. The presence of mat staining, fox marks, and attenuated colors can significantly impact the overall aesthetic and historical integrity of these artworks. When considering a purchase of a Jasper Johns print, it is crucial to be wary of dealers who claim prints are in good condition despite such issues, as this may be a deliberate attempt to mislead buyers. Transparency is imperative in the art market and dealers who purposefully omit condition details are not acting in the best interest of the collector. It is also advisable to avoid dealers who artificially enhance colors in photos, distorting the true condition of the artwork. Choosing dealers who provide accurate representations, even if it reveals imperfections, ensures that buyers make well-informed decisions, maintaining the authenticity and value of Jasper Johns prints over time.
#JasperJohns donates 23 signed & numbered limited edition prints to Davison Art Center @wesleyan_u: in honor of #RichardField, author of three catalogue raisonnés of Jasper Johns prints. https://t.co/BMMjuHNiTy pic.twitter.com/UHXUtGF7cy
— Jasper Johns Prints (@JohnsPrints) February 20, 2019
