Jasper Johns / In Press

Centering on The Dutch Wives, a double-panel encaustic-and-newsprint painting in the artist’s signature “crosshatch” motif, this catalogue explores the impact of print on the work of Jasper Johns. The two panels are imperfect duplicates of each other, thus evoking issues of replication that are native to reproductive media. The book examines “print” and “the press” in terms not only of printmaking and Johns’s celebrated experiments in that medium, but also in informational terms, tracing Johns’s frequent use of newsprint and its material, temporal, political, and formal implications. The publication also features prints and drawings by Johns that help demonstrate the aspects of printmaking that inform his entire oeuvre: repetition, reversal, indexicality, layering, sequencing, and topology.
 
Exhibition schedule: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, opening May 2012