Jasper John’s Target Technics and Creativity, MoMa 1971

Offset lithograph in colors with brush and three watercolor pads on Hahnemuhle Copperplate paper in white plastic clam-shell case. Features Jasper Johns plate signature.

Sheet: 10 3/8 x 8 3/8 in. (26.4 x 21.3 cm).Case: 1 1/2in x 10 5/8 x 8 5/8 in. (3.8 x 27 x 21.9 cm).Minor wear to plastic case; very good overall vintage condition. Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, in conjunction with the MoMA, New York.

Printed signature from an edition of unknown. Complete edition including all elements.

Further Background: "This work, published in connection with the exhibition catalogue Technics and Creativity, presents the outlines of five concentric circles accompanied by three dried watercolor cakes in the primary colors and a small red paintbrush. Johns wryly makes reference to the ubiquity and banality of targets, as well as to the seeming simplicity of his own celebrated creations. Below the work's stamped title and date is the artist’s signature followed by the word "AND" with a blank line, anticipating the addition of another name, that of Johns’s eventual collaborator. Target thus generates a paradox: the work can only be "completed" by someone else, but to do so would perhaps also destroy the integrity of the artwork. Therefore the work must remain in a perpetually unfinished state."The target has been a central motif in Johns’s work since 1955. He has depicted this deceptively simple image in a range of different media, translating between contexts and materials. Johns’s approach prioritizes process and experimentation over definitive conclusions. As the artist famously wrote in a notebook in 1963–64: 'Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it.'" (source: The Met)Jasper Johns experimented with seriality, materiality, and appropriation and helped bridge Abstract Expressionism with the modernist art movements that followed, including Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. Johns often pushed the same motif across various media to explore new possibilities for the image. In his famous paintings of the American flag, Johns referenced both concrete iconography and his own previous versions of artworks. Abstract hatchings are another signature motif for Johns. On paper and canvas, these marks highlight the artist’s conscious control of gesture and form: a major divergence from the bravura brushstrokes of Johns’s Ab-Ex predecessors. Johns spent semesters at the University of South Carolina and Parsons School of Design before dropping out and joining the army. In the 1950s, he was part of New York’s avant-garde arts scene alongside longtime friend, lover, and collaborator Robert Rauschenberg. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, Cologne, and San Francisco, among other cities. His work belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Tate, and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.High auction recordUS$36 million, Sotheby's, 2014

Good condition overall