Jasper Johns was born May 15, 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He briefly studied at the Parsons School of Design in 1949 after moving to New York. Johns emerged as a force in the American art scene in the late 1950s with early work that combined a serious concern for the craft of painting with an everyday, almost absurd subject matter. His richly worked paintings of maps, flags and targets led the artistic community away from Abstract Expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete. In the 1960s, while continuing his work with flags, numbers, target, and maps, Johns began to introduce some of his early sculptural ideas into painting. By the 1980s, Johns' work had changed once again with his later work showing a strong interest in painting autobiographically. Over the past fifty years Johns has created a body of rich and complex work.
In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli saw Johns' work for the first time while visiting the studio of Robert Rauschenberg. Castelli gave the 28-year-old Johns a show on the spot. At his first exhibition the Museum of Modern Art purchased three pieces, proving that Johns' would become a major force in the art world. Johns was given comprehensive retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977. In 1988 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale and in 1996 the Museum of Modern Art presented the exhibition, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective.
Jasper Johns currently lives in Connecticut
