Figuring Jasper Johns

Book excerpt: The author begins this challenging monograph by probing Modernism's surfaces and subjects, its public and private meanings, in order to establish Johns's importance as the modern allegorical artist in the years after Abstract Expressionism. Yet, Figuring Jasper Johns is not an essay that presumes to offer an instant interpretation. Rather, Fred Orton self-consciously constructs a "Jasper Johns" whose work is introduced and explained in three chapters, each of which addresses a specific picture or sculpture like Flag, Painted Bronze (Savarin) and Untitled 1992. These in-depth studies situate individual works in their social context as well as in Johns's oeuvre. Fred Orton's purpose is to get to terms with and find terms for a difficult and elusive body of work by one of the most important artists of the 20th century."