1. Georges Seurat, Torse de femme, 1884, Conté crayon on
Vergé-Paper, 30,8 x 23,5 cm, Collection of Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, an artist linked to
his time and his friendships
The current exhibition of the Kunstmuseum Basel presents the collection of the American artist Jasper Johns. The artist who has a long-term relation with the museum decided to give the curators of the house the control and the decision over his personal collection to create an exhibition.
With 103 drawings by 47 artists from Johns’s collection, the museum presents artists such as Bartolomeo Passarotti, Henry Fuseli, Käthe Kollwitz, Marcel Duchamp and Paul Cézanne. Until now, Johns only accepted to loan a few pictures at a time for exhibition, but it's the first grand exhibition dedicated to his collection, and now his own work.
2. Jasper Johns, © 2022, Pro Litteris, Zürich, John Lund
The artist who defined
American art for decades
Jasper Johns is an American artist born in the 1930s in Georgia. While he spent his early life in Allendale (South Carolina), his parents were divorced and his spent most of his childhood with his paternal grandparents.
His artistic career started at three years old when he began drawing, and thus wanted to become an artist from a young age, despite having little exposure to the arts where he grew up.
Following the death of his grandfather in 1939, Johns spent a year living with his mother and stepfather in South Carolina, and then six years living with his Aunt in South Carolina. In the meantime, he graduated as valedictorian of Edmunds High School in 1947, where he once again lived with his mother and her family.
Afterwards, the artist studied art for a total of three semesters at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, from 1947 to 1948. Then, he moved to New York City and enrolled briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949.
His career only started out in 1953, when he returned to New York in the summer and worked at Marboro Books and began to meet some of the artists who would be formative in his early career, such as Sari Dienes, Rachel Rosenthal, and Robert Rauschenberg, with Johns began a relationship of artistic and personal significance until 1961.
He visited numerous time the studio of those artists, and more prominently Rauschenberg's studio, where one day the gallery owner Leo Castelli asked to see Johns's art. The gallerist recalled the conversation as is:
"So we went down. It was just the floor below. There was a fantastic display of flags and targets. You know the target with the plastic eyes, the one with the faces. The Green Target was at the Jewish Museum, but there was a big white flag, a smaller white flag, numbers, the alphabet, anything—all those great masterpieces.".
The gallerist immediately offered Johns an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. During the show, two of the eighteen works on view sold, while the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr. purchased three paintings from the show, which were the first works by Johns to enter a museum collection.
Since then, Johns had numerous exhibitions about his works, but it's the first time he sees his collection publicly. While speaking of its collection, the Kunstmuseum Basel was one of the key museums in the career of the artist.
The aim of the exhibition
and the link to the museum
Jasper Johns offer to the public, his own collection, but how does longstanding and close relationship with the artist started out in Basel ?
At the time numerous curators and directors such as Carlo Huber, Franz Meyer, Christian Geelhaar, and Dieter Koepplin as head of the Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings) built personal rapports with Johns beginning in 1968, thus acquiring his first prints in 1969-1970. Since then, most of the acquisitions we're works on paper, but also paintings and assemblages from most of his periods such as "The Bath" - 1988, "Flag Above White with Collage" - 1955, "Figure 2" - 1962 and numerous others.
With this acquisition, the museum strengthened this relationship of mutual trust with collaborative projects and extraordinarily generous gifts, in particular, he gave the museum works in honor of his close friends Huber and Geelhaar.
3. Paul Cézanne, Baigneur debout / Baigneur descendant dans l'eau, 1885, Watercolour on paper, 21,6 x 12,7 cm, Collection of Jasper Johns
The collection presented in the exhibition room of the Neubau is a selection of the works presented in six sections. But the start of the show was around the subject of the human body, which figures prominently in the majority of the works.
Most of the works of the exhibition feel like "unfinished", or showcase the process of the creation of the works, but if you zoom out, you see a rich variety of graphical expression from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including collages, sketches, seemingly incidental doodles, elaborate studies, painterly compositions and even musical notations.
On a second hand, the collection also present the passion John's had on the medium of drawing in all its manifold facets. Over the decades, the artist acquired outstanding and distinctive drawings from well-known artists such as Bartolomeo Passarotti, Henry Fuseli, Käthe Kollwitz, but mostly from his friends (mostly in exhcnagce) such as Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and Franz Kline.
Thus, the collection stands out as a portrait of the social fabric into which Johns’s long life and creative career have been woven. These works are the traces of personal encounters, alliances, mutual appreciation, and moments in family life such as birthdays or Christmas parties, as attested by the dedications on many of them.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Kunstmuseum Basel
Date: 30.9.2023 - 4.2.2024
Curator: Anita Haldemann
Ticket: Available on the website of the Kunstmuseum Basel OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstmuseum Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 8
CH-4010 Basel
Phone: +41 61 206 62 62
Fax: +41 61 206 62 52
Mail: info@kunstmuseumbasel.ch