Jasper Johns: Privileged Information [Hardcover]

Jill Johnston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1996

Fusing criticism and biography, this work offers insight into the life and work of America's pre-eminent living artist. Assigned to write a review of Jasper Johns's "The Seasons", a series of paintings that would be acclaimed at the 1988 Venice Biennale, Jill Johnston became intrigued by a mysterious detail in each of these paintings which is designed to look like a jigsaw puzzle piece. She found the source of this detail in Grunewald's 16th-century masterpiece, the "Isenheim Alterpiece" and it was this image, of a grotesquely diseased and dying man, that helped Johnston unlock an autobiographical core in Johns's work. Whereas most critics have been impressed by the formal qualities of Johns's paintings, Johnston discovers riches of personal meaning throughout his art. She charts the evolution of Johns's artistic, personal and public identities, from his family roots in South Carolina though to the early 1950s when Johns, together with Rauschenberg, Cunningham and Cage, overturned assumtions about modern art, dance, music and theatre. She interviewed many figures associated with Johns and had several enigmatic encounters with Johns himself.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An artist's private life is often reflected in his work. Frequently the private is made public, and often this connection makes the work more accessible and interesting. Critic Jill Johnston has taken on the task of exploring the life and work of Jasper Johns--that most private of contemporary artists--and has succeeded brilliantly. Johnston is not simply out to reveal Johns's gayness but to explore how his sexuality has shaped his life and work. Johnston's critical eye is unwavering, her ability to delineate political and social contexts is unnervingly on-target. The fact that Johns resisted Johnston's efforts at biography gives the book an underlying tension making it even more fascinating. Jasper Johns: Privileged Information is a fine, intelligent work of biography and criticism.

From Publishers Weekly

Despite his fame as an artist, Johns has always managed to keep his personal life a mystery. Nevertheless, Johnston (Secret Lives in Art) finds clues to his identity in two figures, a plague victim and a soldier, that he has hidden as abstractions in many of his paintings since the early 1980s. She sees these images, traced from Matthias Grunewald's 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece, as opposing aspects of Johns's personality?the plague victim symbolizing his unhappy childhood and the soldier representing the heroic artist. She makes Johns's obsession with them the starting point of a quest to rout out details of his "secret autobiography" and show how his life has influenced his art. Her thesis is intriguing, and her analyses of Johns's paintings insightful, but her spiteful comments on the contemporary art world are disturbing, as are her accounts of her persistent interrogation of the artist and his family to ferret out the personal, such as his relationship with his parents and his homosexuality. Johns refused to give her any information, nor would he allow reproductions of his paintings in the book. There are, however, photographs of the artist, his family and the Grunewald altarpiece. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 335 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson; First Edition edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500017360
• ISBN-13: 978-0500017364
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,777,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Love Johns Hate the Book, May 29, 2003

By 

JMichael (Phoenix AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (Hardcover)

The deeper I got into this book, the more I disliked it. It is an invasion of privacy...of a person who has decided to try and remain as private and secluded as he can be (which, by the way, is his right to do). I did read with interest as she helped to unravel the complexity behind his paintings, but did not find any interest in her exploration of his deeply personal life. Besides, the author has a tendency to rant and ramble for whole chapters at a time, which I found tedious to say the least. I gave the book 2 stars because I did learn a few things about Johns. But I can't really recommend the book to anyone.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars One talent wasted besmirching another, April 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (Hardcover)

May we all live to see the day when the present fad of mixing up biography with criticism ends! Once again a critic (i.e., wannabe artist) does her best to soil the work of a truly creative artist by trying to impose her own notions of his life on his work. Or is it the other way around--imposing notions of the work onto the life? It hardly matters--the result is the same. Nothing of substance is said about either, and in the process of saying nothing, she drags in all kinds of ugliness. Of course all the while, the author is claiming to be a great admirer of Johns, even as she purveys her gossip and hearsay. Finally, as is usually the case with such psychographers, she's just revealing her own unsavory motives and hungering ego. The only reason I give the book two stars is that she's not a bad writer. Too bad she had to waste her talent on such a project.

4.0 out of 5 stars Investigative Bio-Analysis, September 28, 2011

By 

disco75 "disco75" (State College, PA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (Hardcover)

This is a non-standard, art-detective approach to weaving a tapestry composed of art interpretation and biography. The art detective slant makes the erudite prose forward-moving. Johnston does a good job reporting her detection of a motif hidden in plain sight in Johns' canvases. She conveys formative experiences that may be relevant to why the motif was included in paintings Johns produced year after year. In so doing, she discovers fascinating information from Johns' life. This includes repeated abandonment in childhood, family lore, patterns of his living with Robert Rauschenberg, participation in the 1950s power group of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and himself. She discusses the polydetermined sources of the images and patterns in the paintings. The author's work here complements similarly-themed writing of the period, including the 1989 Pollock biography, Larry Rivers autobiography, 2003's *Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara*, Lee Hall's Betty Parsons biography, Calvin Tomkins' *Off The Wall*, and Irving Sandler's memoir.

Readers who posted reviews on this site seem to have more objections to Johnston's book than the critics did at the time of the volume's publication. If the objections involve homosexuality, one wonders how the criticisms would sound had the artist been a secretly-married straight man being researched, or an asexual ascetic. Protestations about the homophobia Johnston explores are refuted by the increasingly documented 1950s actions of critics such as Clem Greenberg with Pollock, Harold Rosenberg, etc in the books noted above. The objection about an artist's privacy seems more viable, but here Johnston is not discussing a reclusive figure such as Clyfford Still who removed the artworks from public view but rather Jasper Johns, who participated actively in a growing, lucrative art market and publicity venues such as The Simpsons. Whether Privileged Information should have been released prior to John's death is a debating point; I for one am very glad to have read the book as it has sharpened my appreciation for the art many times over.