![]() ![]() “I suppose all the mythology sensitizes you, prepares you to be impressed, to feel awe.” This is an apt description of Johns himself, who has, for much of his adult life, cultivated the aura of an enigma.Īt 88, Johns remains physically imposing: He is barrel-chested, and his once boyish face has weathered into a craggy atlas. “Just his physical presence was impressive,” Johns said of Duchamp. In a 1977 interview with the author Edmund White, Johns described his experience of meeting Marcel Duchamp, one of his artistic idols, who, with the Cubist paintings and ready-made sculptures he began making in the years leading up to World War I, helped drag art into the 20th century in much the same way that Johns would recalibrate the priorities of painting and sculpture at the end of the 1950s. There’s the unframed poster, pinned to a wall, of Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of “Ginevra de’ Benci” (circa 1478), with whom Johns occasionally shares an intense, unsmiling gaze there are the silver cans that hold his brushes there is the model of the human skull on a table. ![]() Every detail inside the studio seems intentional, as if each object were a clue about the man himself. The property is stark and hilly, made up of a series of small barnlike structures, one of which houses Johns’s studio. JASPER JOHNS LIVES on a sprawling estate in Sharon, Conn., a rural town in the Berkshires with a population of about 2,700 people. ![]()
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