Jasper Johns

“It all began...with my painting a picture of an American flag,” Johns remarked in 1959 in reference to this work. Flag was made on a cut bedsheet using oil paint and then encaustic, a method involving pigmented melted wax. Johns dipped strips of cloth and newsprint into the hot wax and then affixed them to the sheet to fill in a penciled outline of the flag. The result is a picture whose process is registered on its surface, a focus on materiality at odds with the expressionistic gestures dominant in painting at the time of Flag’s making. Johns went on to use encaustic to render familiar forms—flags, targets, numbers, letters, and a map of the United States—time and again throughout his career.

Flag constitutes both a thing (a flag) and its representation (a painting of a flag). This built-in ambiguity is the work’s innovation as well as its provocation. MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., hoped to acquire the piece along with three others from Johns’s first solo exhibition, in 1958 at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery. However, the Museum’s Committee and Board of Trustees deemed Flag to be potentially “unpatriotic.” Barr circumvented their objections by asking architect Philip Johnson to acquire the work and donate it to the Museum at a later date.

How is Flag like or different from other flags you’ve seen?

“One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and went out and bought the materials to begin it,” Jasper Johns once said. He used a mixture of hot wax and color, a technique called encaustic.

Look at the work up close. Can you read any of the scraps of newspaper he painted over?