Jasper Johns
Device
1961–1962
Oil on canvas with wood and metal attachments
72 1/16 x 48 3/4 x 4 1/2 in. (183.04 x 123.82 x 11.43 cm)
Gift of The Art Museum League, Margaret J. and George V. Charlton, Mr. and Mrs. James B. Francis, Dr. and Mrs. Ralph Greenlee, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. James H. W. Jacks, Mr. and Mrs. Irvin L. Levy, Mrs. John W. O’Boyle, and Dr. Joanne Stroud in honor of Mrs. Eugene McDermott, 1976.1
© Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The art of Jasper Johns refuses easy summary, and Device offers no exception. Here Johns has fastened to his canvas with butterfly screws two short stretcher bars, normally parts of the frame over which canvas is stretched to create the “body” of a painting. He then rotated these slats through wet oil paint, leaving two half-circles that show their path. Across the canvas Johns painted a riot of reds, yellows, blues, and oranges mixed with black, white, and gray, in a work that resembles more than embodies the famous all-over compositions of abstract expressionism. In the lower section, Johns painted the word “device” in plain block-capitals. These elements form a kind of rote painting machine that nonetheless bears all the traits of a traditional work of art.

In his early paintings, sculpture, and graphic work, Johns combined the ironic drollery of Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who reinvented everyday objects into “readymade” sculpture, with the gesture, scale, and ambition of the abstract expressionists, and the role of chance championed by the American composer John Cage. Clearly, Johns’ art is as much of the mind as of the eye. We are asked to assimilate various bits of information and then produce a synthesis—that is, a meaning. Does Device illustrate art’s devices—elements (stretcher bar, brushstroke, color, title) exposed for all to see? Or is it a wry rejoinder to the heroic excesses of abstract expressionism? Or could it arise from the complex game of word and image that Johns has played throughout his career, one that questions the veracity of sign, symbol, language, and ultimately, knowledge itself? Such questions, not their answers, are most probably the very point of this inscrutable and uncompromising painting.