Untitled (ULAE 324)
15 1/8 x 10 7/8 inchesUntitled (ULAE 324), 2013
paper: 15 1/8 x 10 7/8 inches
image: 14 3/8 x 10 3/8 inches
frame: 16 1/2 x 12 inches
Edition of unknown size with 32 AP's
signed & dated "J Johns '13" in the stone
Printed by Universal Limited Art Editions, Bay Shore, NY
Published by Art in America and Sharon Coplan Hurowitz
© 2024 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Literature
Carlos Basualdo, Scott Rothkopf, Jasper Johns Mind/Mirror, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021, another impression reproduced plate 27, pg. 294.
To be included in the forthcoming update to: The Prints of Jasper Johns: A Catalogue Raisonne, ULAE, New York, Catalogue Reference ULAE 324.
Exhibited
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Jasper Johns Mind/Mirror, September 29, 2021 - February 13, 2022, another impression exhibited.
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Jasper Johns Reversals, October 23, 2015 - January 31, 2016, another impression exhibited.
Selected Museum Collections
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Additional Photos
Full Sheet
Signature & Date lower right
Image Detail
Encompassing key motifs that have preoccupied Johns for more than fifty years, Untitled comprises three distinct bands: the top register contains numbers running from zero to nine, the center features a map of the United States and the bottom presents the alphabet in American Sign Language. The irregular pools of gray and black tones represent Johns’s attempt to capture the aesthetic of ink on plastic—a material he has used in his drawings since 1962—in a print.
JASPER JOHNS MAPS
Encompassing key motifs that have preoccupied Johns for more than fifty years, Untitled comprises three distinct bands: the top register contains numbers running from zero to nine, the center features a map of the United States and the bottom presents the alphabet in American Sign Language.
The irregular pools of gray and black tones represent Johns’s attempt to capture the aesthetic of ink on plastic—a material he has used in his drawings since 1962—in a print. This is the first work Johns created exclusively with digital technology. He drew the various components, including his signature, on different sheets that Bill Goldston of U.L.A.E. (Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc.), the Long Island printing studio and publisher where Johns began what would become an important part of his oeuvre) then combined digitally for the artist’s approval.
Untitled, 2013, single color offset lithograph on Giama Natural paper
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
The map of North America the artist adopted for this series of paintings and prints was based on the type used in school text-books. As such it is familiar to all Americans – an object that is known, yet not seen. Johns’s works operate by encouraging viewers to see this object anew. In Untitled (ULAE 324), 2013, by stripping away all state names, adding numerals 0-9 and the Sign Language alphabet, Jasper Johns opens up the map to new aesthetic possibilities. Other readings prompted by the work’s erasure of all of the state names include a reflection upon the functioning of memory and the use of labels and symbols as cornerstones of the cognitive process.
Johns's concerted consideration of his Maps, along with his Flags, during the 1960s has led scholars and critics to discuss the symbolism in his repeated use of these motifs. “When the flags are seen in conjunction with Johns’s recurrent, simultaneous depictions of maps of the United States,” writes Scott Rothkopf, curator of the artist’s recent retrospective organized jointly by the Whitney Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “they inevitably serve as wellsprings for meditations on the nation and its history, present and even future”. Yet Johns himself has repeatedly said that none of these motifs were chosen with any political connotation in mind, merely that they are a “thing the mind already knows,” connecting his work to a lived experience, while at the same time allowing him to focus his attention on mark-making, color and medium. During his entire career, Johns has been steadfastly interested in issues of representation.
By exploring different media and taking his motivation from objects and forms he encountered every day, he became the bridge between the two great movements of twentieth-century American art, that of abstraction and Pop. Yet unlike Rothko and Pollock, or Warhol and Lichtenstein, Johns focused his attention not on the emotional pull of his work, focusing instead on an interrogation of the iconography of his chosen subject. He saw that these cultural motifs—maps, numbers, the alphabet etc.—were so ingrained in our consciousness that their formal beauty had often been overlooked. Thus, perception became Johns’s area of concern—how the viewer consumed and interpreted these forms—and in doing so he rejected the traditionally dogmatic approach of figuration and abstraction. However, rather than abandon them completely, he merged the two, investing the viewer with an active and more vital role in the process. Johns’s Maps, formed a pivotal part of his oeuvre and by closely examining the underlying structure of the very world that supported his practice, Johns gave rise to new inquiries into the nature of art and at the same time produced some of the most perceptive and celebrated works of our time.
