AMERICAN, b. 1930

The reverberations of the work of Jasper Johns affected nearly every artistic movement from the 1950s through the present day. Johns engaged with modernist precedents like the original Dada movement and Abstract Expressionism in order to actively refute the hierarchy of modernism that reduced the aesthetic experience to the distinct material qualities of the medium and removed it from the viewer’s life. He did so by initiating a dialogue with the viewer and their cultural context through his artistic exploration of how people see the things around them.

By representing common objects and images in the realm of fine art, Johns broke down the boundaries traditionally separating fine art and everyday life. He effectively laid the foundation for the Pop Art movement’s aesthetic embrace of commodity culture with his playfully subversive appropriation of common signs and products. Johns’ exploration of semiotics and perception also set the stage for both the Conceptual art movement and the Postmodern movement of the following decades, while his multimedia collaborations with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham ushered in the dominance of the performance art movement in the 1960s and 1970s.