Jasper Johns
 Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia. He grew up in South Carolina until he was drafted into the army in and stationed in Japan. Between 1949 and 1951 he studied at the University of South Carolina, Carolina.
He has been called the Zen master of American Art and also the antithesis of Robert Rauschenberg’s passionate, Jack Daniels swilling welcome to chaos. Both artists attended Black Mountain College, both worked from 1955-1960 in the same New York City loft. Both turned recognizable imagery into art but in very different ways. Working together for Tiffany’s and Bonwit Tellers, they collaborated on window displays. One famous Tiffany window featured fake potatoes, real dirt and real diamonds, like a painting created by Jasper Johns, the window combined artifice and reality that glitters with real gems. During the 50’s and 60’s, Johns chose familiar two dimensional objects like flags, targets and maps, things that the mind already knows and said that they gave him “room to work on other levels.”
Johns produced a number of sculptures that have stated the Pop Art problem of everyday objects which in Marcel DuChamps words “become a work of art because the artists says it is.” John’s art has a child-like simplicity of the language of description. John’s art is a study of ambiguity and metamorphosis. His art is sometimes intentionally oblique, cool and detached, therefore open to multiple interpretations. Here is a summary of his work method: take an object, do something to it, do something else to it.
In 1985, acknowledged as one of the most esteemed living artists, Johns began to make his paintings more personal. He introduced figures into his series that explored the passage of time entitled Four Seasons. Although the work has autobiographical implications, his symbols puzzled more than illuminated the viewer.
Both Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are of major significance in that they move away from abstract expressionism and move into the exploration of new subject matter involving the everyday image of America. They contributed to the creation of new and impressively revived ways of seeing and rethinking of the nature of art, rooted in abstract art.
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