The Royal Academy of Arts in London is due to stage a major exhibition on the US artist Jasper Johns, the institution announced yesterday (1 September). The exhibition, which will run in the academy's main galleries (23 September-10 December 2017), will bring together Johns’s paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings.
Focusing on the artist’s innovations in sculpture and his use of collage in paintings, “the exhibition will give focus to different chapters of Johns’s career,” says a press statement. A spokeswoman adds that further details will be announced next year.
Richard Shiff, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, says: “I would assume that there would be a strong representation of Johns's recent sculpture, which is quite amazing in both its broad impact and the subtlety of its detailing. This new sculptural work should be much better known than it is.”
In the case of Jasper Johns, the retrospective exhibition is a particularly interesting challenge, given both the variety and duration of his career, says Isabelle Loring Wallace, the associate professor of contemporary art at the University of Georgia.
“By now, scholars are agreed about the significance of his mid-century works, but what Johns’s paintings might come to mean within the long history of art is a different, if unanswerable question,” says Wallace, who is also the author of a monograph on the artist, Jasper Johns (Phaidon, 2014).
John Ravenal, the executive director of the DeCordova sculpture park and museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, tells us: “What’s most intriguing is how motifs in Johns's work reappear over time, in various mediums, and in combination with other motifs.”
Tim Marlow, the artistic director of the Royal Academy, highlights the show on his blog, saying: “You may be most familiar with the vivid realism of his 1950s paintings of flags and targets, but as you’ll discover, with every new decade Johns has explored new themes and ideas, as well as new ways of working.”
The 2017 programme at the Royal Academy, announced yesterday, also includes America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s (25 February-4 June), which will feature Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) painting, being exhibited outside of North America for the first time. Additionally, the institution will host Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 (11 February-17 April); America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s (25 February-4 June); Matisse in the Studio (5 August-12 November); and Dalí/Duchamp (7 October-7 January 2018).
UPDATE (5 September): The curators of the Jasper Johns exhibition are Edith Devaney, contemporary curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, and the US scholar, Dr Roberta Bernstein.
