Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ Opens at The Broad

Emily Ludolf

After starting its art calendar in 2017 with the celebrated Yayoi Kusama “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” exhibition, which has won accolades worldwide, The Broad will now host Jasper John’s legendary installation from the Leo Castelli Gallery, first shown in 1958. “Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth,'” is a groundbreaking show of his target and flag artworks, designed to question nationalism and the American Dream. These works had a great impact on contemporary art, and he pieces even draw into question artistic representation itself. Asking if, philosophically at least, it is possible for art to represent the real world of objects. The art critic Leo Steinberg famously suggested that the works seemed “co-extensive” with their canvases. He meant by this that they managed to blur the line between the symbolic and the real.

These artworks show Jasper John’s desire to dismantle modern art, and deconstruct it into something much more post-modern. John’s influenced a whole movement of irony in art, through his use of symbolic motifs, and the detailed cross-hatching of his paintings from the 1970s. The exhibition also features his recent works of thickly layered paint, and is actually the 87 year-old Jasper Johns’ first major retrospective in LA, many years after showing in Pasadena at the Museum of Art in 1965. As the Broad’s director Joanne Hayler puts it  “ Johns has made a few things since then.”

This show reveals the interest that the Broads have always had in Jasper Johns’ artworks. They have collected his work since 1978, and now own a collection of seven of his works, which will be on display. The other 120 works in the exhibition come from a combination of private and public collection, spanning six decades of Johns’ career, with some rarely seen pieces starring, such as the 1958 canvas “Three Flags” completed in encaustic, a process of layering wax.

“Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth‘” is on display at The Broad from Feb. 10, 2018 until May 13, 2018.