Category: Artist
Nationality: American
Last Year: 9
‘We worked for years to get rid of all that’, Rothko notoriously said of Jasper Johns’s flag and target paintings. Tough luck: approaching his eightieth birthday and having outlived his former coeval Rauschenberg, Johns is apparently demonstrating no inclination to hang up his brushes; museum curators show no signs of forgetting his preeminence, either. In the past year, following the Metropolitan Museum’s much-praised, tonally specific Jasper Johns: Gray in 2008, Johns has enjoyed an 87-work ‘Focus’ exhibition at MoMA, in honour of the institution’s purchase of a new series of works on paper. Meanwhile, in turbulent market times Johns enjoys an auction value secured by his living-legend status and by collectors clinging jealously to his works. And, really, who can blame them?