Jasper Johns

American painter, sculptor, and printmaker (b. 1930), a bridge from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and Minimalism, famous for his flags, targets, maps, and numbers.

Johns took familiar, flat, public signs and repainted them as dense, hand-worked objects, reopening the question of what a picture is — a founding move of postwar American art.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary. Johns is a postwar art-world contemporary of R. Buckminster Fuller, grouped with him in the corpus's survey of the twentieth-century artists among whom Fuller moved and was collected. His map paintings in particular share a period fascination — Fuller's Dymaxion map among its exemplars — with the image of the whole earth, though the two worked from opposite ends of art and design. He stands as a contemporary of the milieu, not a collaborator.

See Also

• We Are All Astronauts (We Are All Astronauts) — catalog of Fuller's presence in the postwar art world
• Andy Warhol (Andy Warhol) — fellow figure of the same Pop-era American art scene

Sources

• We Are All Astronauts (source reference) — situates Johns among Fuller's art-world contemporaries