#THREE FLAGS JASPER JOHNS FULL#

Through the colours, you can make out fragments of newspaper headlines in the collage below.

But what does it say about the actual US flag? Everything.

It gives Flag a solid feel, more like a sculpture than a painting. Simply called Flag, and owned by New York’s MoMA, it is made of a layer of collage covered with a much thicker piling-up of encaustic paint that produces an enduring, almost rubbery surface. But the breakthrough for this new approach, to art and to life, came when Johns made his first US flag in 1954-55. They all broke with the austere sublimity of abstract expressionism to incorporate real life in their creations – from Rauschenberg mixing photographs, paint and stuffed animals in his Combines, to Twombly spattering enigmatic graffiti on to canvas. In the 1950s he, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly formed both an art movement and a love triangle. He’s reticent about every aspect of his art and life. Johns is not an overtly political artist. But to fully understand this work, you need to follow Johns’ very personal interpretations of the flag over nearly 70 years. What makes Johns’ American flag so perfect for this charged, climactic moment? Well, this is an anxious image of the nation fraying. Who, at the close of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, can now utter that phrase without irony? American Dream? Can those words really apply, given that the arrival of this election has been marked by shops and businesses being boarded up, and with Trump making bizarre remarks challenging the sanctity of the poll, threatening the entire democratic process?

Three years ago, the London venue put this image on the posters and catalogue for an exhibition called The American Dream. The British Museum has marked the United States’ big vote by announcing its acquisition of Flags I, the screenprint by Jasper Johns that is said to be worth millions. Could there be a more fitting symbol of America right now?

#THREE FLAGS JASPER JOHNS FULL#

But come closer and you’ll notice how pockmarked and scarred its surface is, full of mysterious holes as if nibbled by cockroaches. From a distance, it looks bold and bright, like the very stars and stripes it is representing, an ideal as much as a flag.

Three flags jasper johns