Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns painted the American flag and made it impossible to say whether you were looking at a flag or a picture of one. He grew up in South Carolina, was drafted to Japan during the Korean war, and settled in New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg; the two shared a building, a relationship and six years of daily argument, and between them turned American painting away from Abstract Expressionist gesture. He took subjects that were already flat and already known - flags, targets, numbers, letters, maps - so that nothing in the image needed interpreting and all the attention fell on the surface, which he built in encaustic, pigment in hot wax, over collaged newsprint. The first show at Leo Castelli in 1958 sold almost out to the Museum of Modern Art and made him famous at twenty-eight. He also made sculpture of ale cans and flashlights, cast in bronze and painted, and became one of the most important printmakers of the century. He designed for Merce Cunningham's company for a decade after Rauschenberg left. He destroyed nearly all his work from before 1954. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Flag was painted in 1954-55 on plywood over a bedsheet, after a dream, when he was twenty-four. Three Flags sold to the Whitney in 1980 for a million dollars, then a record for a living American artist. He and Rauschenberg supported themselves for years designing window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller under the joint pseudonym Matson Jones. His later work turned inward and allusive, quoting Grunewald and his own earlier pictures. He established a foundation on a former farm in Connecticut to give artists residencies. He is the most expensive living American painter at auction.

• Lived: 1930 CE – ?
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist