Jasper Johns Livres

Jasper Johns to Jeff Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is the first large-scale exhibition of the Broads' achievement, presenting more than 100 works of art from these two significant collections. The show highlights American artists whose paintings, sculptures, and photographs the Broads have acquired in depth, among them Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, and Cy Twombly, Johns, Koons, and the Los Angeles artists John Baldessari, Sharon Lockhart, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Therrien. German artists such as George Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer are also represented. Together, these works form an invaluable record of the artistic achievements of the past forty years.This catalogue, published in conjunction with the exhibition, illustrates the objects in the exhibition as well as several related works from the Broad collections. The accompanying texts include an interview with Eli and Edythe Broad by exhibition curators Stephanie Barron and Lynn Zelevansky, as well as essays by art historians Thomas Crow, Sabine Eckmann, Joanne Heyler, and Pepe Karmel, which place the works in critical and historical context.

After completing the installation of his 1996 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Jasper Johns retreated to his studio in Connecticut to wipe the slate clean, beginning a body of work that was a dramatic departure from anything he had made before. This volume reproduces for the first time the complete series of those magnificent works that Johns, one of our greatest living artists, has made over the last eight years.The first painting in this new series included a string hanging from upper right to lower left, generating a curve called a "catenary," and this curve became the compositional backbone of the entire series. Johns produced a total of 61 paintings, drawings and prints based on the catenary theme, all of which are reproduced in this volume. The work is saturated with autobiographical references, both transparent and opaque, while it simultaneously encourages multiple layers of meaning. Sensual surfaces, fragile constructions, and formal rigor meet allusions to key moments in the history of modern art and motifs from Johns's earlier work. The poetry of Johns's catenary series is explored in an illustrated essay by the scholar Scott Rothkopf, published alongside the catalogue's 51 color plates.