Untitled
24 x 19 inchesUntitled
(ULAE 186), 1977
paper: 24 x 19 inches
frame: 26 x 21 inches
edition: 130 + 13 AP's, 16 HC's & 8 PP's
numbered, signed and dated "Jasper Johns '77" lower right in pencil
Published by Jasper Johns and Simca Print Artists, Inc.
Printed by Kenjiro Nonaka and Hiroshi Kawanishi
© 2024 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Literature
Richard Field, Jasper Johns Prints 1970-1977, Wesleyan University, Middletown, 1978, Catalogue Reference 260, p. 123, another impression reproduced in black and white.
Richard Field, The Prints of Jasper Johns 1960-1993: A Catalogue Raisonne, ULAE, New York, 1994, Jasper Johns Untitled (ULAE 186), 1977, Catalogue Reference ULAE 186, n.p., another impression reproduced in full-page color.
Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns The Screenprints, Fisher Landau Center, 1996, plate 13, n.p., another impression reproduced in color.
Selected Museum Collections
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Davison Art Center, Middletown
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Additional Photos
Full Sheet
Edition Number, Signature & Date lower right
Image Detail
Beginning with his 1972 painting Untitled, Jasper Johns developed his motif of crosshatch lines, experimenting with colors, patterns, mirroring and reversals. According to Johns, the inspiration for his crosshatch 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 immediately thought I would use it for my next painting. 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, Jasper Johns created many variations on the crosshatch theme in paintings, drawings and prints.
JASPER JOHNS CROSSHATCH MOTIF
Beginning with his 1972 painting Untitled, Jasper Johns developed his motif of crosshatch lines, experimenting with colors, patterns, mirroring and reversals. According to Johns, the inspiration for his crosshatch 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 immediately thought I would use it for my next painting. 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, Jasper Johns created many variations on the crosshatch theme in paintings, drawings and prints.
“Jasper 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
Jasper 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 Jasper Johns's paintings. Crosshatching first appeared in the painting Untitled, 1972, where it fills the far left panel of a four-part work. Jasper Johns recollects 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 established as to when Jasper Joins observed 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 crosshatching would already have been very familiar to Jasper Johns as an acclaimed draftsmen and printmaker. For reference, from the Middle Ages onward these techniques were basic 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.
At the same time, crosshatching offered Johns a way to further subdue the residual meanings that clung to these other found motifs. Crosshatching was a purer vehicle, emptied of every reference except to itself, even if sparked by a passing car. In short, it was a mark about making marks, or, as Rosalind Kraus called it, "an image of pictorial technique.” This extreme neutrality explains why Johns adopted crosshatching as the exclusive motif for his next decade of abstract paintings, and why, too, by the end of that time, it had become a straightjacket from which he sought to escape. In addition to its flexibility, crosshatching also allowed Johns to further his interest in confusing the boundaries between abstraction and representation. In Jasper Johns series of Flag paintings, he had extended the image to the edges of the canvas, raising the question of whether it was a flag or the image of a flag. Similarly, the crosshatch works can be seen both as abstract paintings and as highly realistic paintings of abstract patterns.
With his Crosshatch/Untitled prints, Johns sought to evoke a “new form", one that is growing and splitting in new visual directions. "The Untitled 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." In Jasper Johns Untitled (ULAE 186), 1977, a color screenprint co-published by Johns and Simca Print Artists, Inc., the crosshatch lines in the are primary colors, red, yellow and blue; the impression is particularly vibrant as the impression is not faded; the extraordinary screenprint is a jewel and is floated in an archival aluminum frame with UV plexiglass created by Bark Frameworks, New York.
Throughout his career, Jasper Johns has experimented by showing the same idea differently, repeating forms and motifs in various media. As evidenced by Johns’ work from the 1970's and early 1980's, the crosshatch motif lent itself exceptionally well to this working method. Printmaking allowed Jasper 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. Jasper Johns has masterly taken a technique historically used in drawing and printmaking to evoke shade and depth, making it the subject of his work.
#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
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.
