The chance to return to a work again and again is the greatest benefit an art museum offers. The first time I saw the Art Institute’s new acquisition, Jasper Johns’s Near the Lagoon (2003), I was awed by this towering painting’s insistent silence. Draped across a dense forest of gray and off-gray daubs of paint is a lone strand of twine, hanging naturally in a catenary curve–a shape used in the design of suspension bridges and one that Johns has employed more than once in recent works. Sewn-on canvas patches combine with other elements to create a kind of puzzle. The second time I was surprised by tremendous melancholy. Johns had pressed the twine against the paint when it was wet to produce necklacelike curves, both graceful and limp. Hinged panels at the side recall altarpieces but are far too narrow to contain pictures. On a third visit, the painting’s mystery and sense of resignation combined to charge each element with a secret meaning.
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Johns, who was born in 1930, had great public success with his very first one-person show, which included flag and target paintings, in 1958. A major figure ever since, he’s justly credited with bridging the seemingly incompatible worlds of abstract expressionism and pop art and has managed to retain an emotional dimension in his work while treating meaning as paradoxical at best.
“One of the things I found so moving about Near the Lagoon,” Wood says, “is that it’s a masterpiece by a totally mature artist creating profound work at an advanced age. He’s looking back on himself and on the history of art. There are a number of extraordinary artists who did this–Titian, Rembrandt, Matisse. We’re obsessed in this country with the notion that an artist’s earlier art is always the most important.” Druick says he finds the painting “deeply poetic and spiritual. It evokes–without being limited to–the dip in the body of Christ in depictions of the deposition.” He adds that the collaged canvas pieces are Johns’s reference to a painting Manet did but disliked and cut up, later pieced together by Degas. “There are so few works of art that simultaneously embody looking, making, and thinking about painting,” Rondeau says. “It’s in the tradition of Velazquez, Manet, Cezanne, Pollock, and the plan is to keep it on view almost all the time.”
Art Institute, Gallery 262
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Gregorio Binuya–Getty Images, Fred Camper.
