Emerging from the shadow of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns presented the American art world with something startlingly familiar yet profoundly challenging: a painting of the American flag. His first Flag (1954-55) wasn’t a gestural outpouring of emotion, nor was it a simple representation. Instead, it was a meticulously constructed object that questioned the very nature of seeing, symbols, and the substance of painting itself. Central to this quiet revolution was Johns’ chosen medium: encaustic, an ancient technique involving pigmented hot wax.
Breaking from Abstraction
The post-war American art scene was dominated by the heroic gestures and emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Their canvases were arenas for action, capturing the artist’s inner turmoil or existential angst through drips, slashes, and dynamic brushwork. Johns, along with contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg, sought a different path. They turned towards the commonplace, the “things the mind already knows,” as Johns put it. The flag, targets, numbers, letters – these were motifs instantly recognizable, yet Johns rendered them in a way that forced viewers to reconsider their meaning and physical presence.
His choice of the American flag was particularly potent. It was an image saturated with meaning, identity, and emotion, yet also a flat, graphic design. Johns claimed the idea came to him in a dream. By painting it, he wasn’t necessarily making a patriotic or critical statement in the conventional sense; rather, he was exploring the boundary between a revered symbol and a mere pattern, between the depicted object and the physical object of the painting itself. Is it a flag, or is it a painting of a flag? This ambiguity became a hallmark of his early work.
The Encaustic Method: More Than Just Paint
Johns’ decision to use encaustic was crucial to the Flag paintings’ impact. Encaustic involves mixing pigments with heated beeswax and applying it to a surface, usually wood panel or canvas. As the wax cools, it hardens, creating a durable, luminous finish. It’s a demanding medium requiring rapid work before the wax solidifies.
Johns adapted this ancient technique distinctively. He often worked on fabric, typically cotton sheeting, which he would dip into the hot, pigmented wax or brush the wax onto. Crucially, he layered this waxed fabric over a collage of newspaper scraps adhered to the canvas or panel support. The process involved building up the surface, layer by layer. The stars and stripes weren’t simply painted on top; they were constructed through these layered, waxed fabric pieces, often cut precisely to form the flag’s elements.
Texture, Translucency, and Time
The use of encaustic offered several unique qualities perfect for Johns’ conceptual goals:
- Texture: Unlike the flat application of oil or acrylic, encaustic allowed for a rich, built-up surface. Brushstrokes were preserved within the cooled wax, giving the painting a tangible, almost sculptural quality. The surface wasn’t smooth; it was bumpy, worked-over, bearing the evidence of its making.
- Translucency: Beeswax possesses a natural translucency. This meant that the underlying layers, particularly the fragments of newspaper collage, often remained partially visible beneath the coloured wax. These glimpses of text and image added another layer of complexity, grounding the iconic symbol in the ephemera of daily life and newsprint, though the specific text was usually obscured and rendered illegible, preventing straightforward interpretation.
- Deliberation: Working with hot wax required a methodical approach, quite different from the spontaneous gestures of Abstract Expressionism. It slowed down the painting process, emphasizing conscious construction over subconscious expression. This deliberation mirrored the conceptual nature of the work itself.
- Objecthood: The thick, waxy medium transformed the flat image of the flag into a distinct physical object. The painting wasn’t just representing a flag; it asserted its own presence as a constructed thing, reinforcing the ambiguity between symbol and object.
Verified Technique: Jasper Johns’ encaustic process typically involved applying pigmented hot beeswax mixed with damar resin for hardness. He often applied this mixture over a base layer of newspaper clippings collaged onto canvas or wood panels. Pieces of fabric dipped in or coated with the pigmented wax were then applied to build up the flag’s design, creating a textured, semi-translucent surface where layers interacted visually.
Context and Meaning in Post-War Art
Johns’ Flag paintings landed in a cultural landscape grappling with post-war identity, the Cold War, and burgeoning consumerism. While Abstract Expressionism had been championed as a symbol of American freedom and individualism, Johns’ cooler, more analytical approach seemed to reflect a different sensibility. His work wasn’t about heroic self-expression but about perception and the nature of signs.
The encaustic technique, with its embedded newspaper fragments (often from the time of the painting’s creation), subtly anchored the timeless symbol of the flag in a specific historical moment. The wax seemed to preserve these fragments, like insects in amber, suggesting layers of history and information beneath the familiar surface. The technique itself, being ancient, also added a sense of historical depth, contrasting with the flag’s relatively modern context as a national emblem.
While often seen as a precursor to Pop Art due to his use of commonplace imagery, Johns’ approach differed significantly. Pop artists tended to embrace the techniques of mass production and commercial art (like screen printing), often with an ironic or celebratory stance. Johns’ method was laborious, handcrafted, and focused on the material properties of the paint and the philosophical questions surrounding representation. His work retained a connection to the act of painting, albeit in a radically different way than the Abstract Expressionists.
Variations on a Theme
Johns didn’t paint just one flag; he returned to the motif repeatedly, exploring its possibilities through variations in colour, scale, and composition. White Flag (1955), for instance, drained the familiar image of its patriotic colours, rendering it entirely in shades of white and off-white encaustic. This muted version further emphasized the texture and the underlying structure, forcing the viewer to engage with the form and substance rather than just the symbolic colour scheme. In Three Flags (1958), he stacked three canvases of decreasing size, each depicting the flag, creating a literal recession into space that played with perspective and the flag’s inherent flatness.
Important Note: Interpreting Johns’ Flag paintings solely as political statements misses their primary focus. While the flag is inherently political, Johns was more concerned with semiotics, perception, and the ontology of art objects. His use of encaustic served these conceptual aims by emphasizing materiality, layering, and the process of construction over simple depiction or commentary.
Enduring Legacy
Jasper Johns’ Flag paintings, realised through his innovative use of encaustic, fundamentally shifted the course of American art. They challenged the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, opened the door for Pop Art and Minimalism by legitimizing everyday imagery, and raised profound questions about how we see and interpret symbols. The choice of encaustic was not incidental; it was integral to the works’ meaning, providing the texture, depth, and object-like quality that made these paintings so revolutionary. By reviving and adapting an ancient medium, Johns created icons of modern art that continue to compel and puzzle viewers, securing his place as a pivotal figure in the landscape of post-war visual culture.
