60
Popular Culture Review
Certainly the American flag is ubiquitioiis in the art criticism. In 1964 the
first flag painting was credited to a dream Johns had that he painted an American
flag‘\ Another theory, proposed by Charles Stuckey during the 1976 bicentennial,
is that the American flag refers to the historical figure of Sergeant Jasper, a soldier
from the artist’s home state of South Carolina who was said to have saved the flag
during the revolutionary war (Stuckey, “Johns: Yet Waving ’ 5).
Once this autobiographical approach is accepted, personal references
abound. It is possible, for example, to find another allusion to the American flag in
the painting Perilous Night, insofar as the words “perilous” and “night” occur in
verses from the Star Spangled Banner. However, it would be wrong to persist in
the trend to establish further parallels between Johns’ early and late work. The
references to the personal dimension of Johns’ art diminish the dialectical play
between formal issues and critical content, thus greatly reducing the complexity of
the commentary. In contrast, criticism that has discussed the commodity character
of the art and readings that have affirmed the formal values of artistic practice
developed by Kozloff, Forge, and Sandler acknowledge some of the problems of
reconciling the formal strengths and originality of Johns’ art with the subject matter
from popular culture. By avoiding dialectical synthesis critics can explore the fonnal
contributions as well as the relationship of the art to popular culture.
The absence of a formula in the most evocative of the criticism resembles
Johns’ own interest in ambiguity. Johns’ famous images which explore figure/ground
relationships such as the mother-in-law/wife from a drawing by W. E. Hill published
in Puck in 1915 and used by the American psychologist Edwin Garrigues Boring,
and the vase/profile based on the perceptual images of the Danish psychologist
Rubin, c. 1920 and Gestalt psychology, provide visual analogies for the dynamic
shifting between the formal and critical readings of Johns’ art (Johnston 36). The
multiple levels of interpretation that occur in the readings of the form and popular
content recall the ambiguity and contrariety the artist John Baldessari has found in
Johns’ work when he observed, “He [Johns] has the ability to entertain paradox, to
entertain two opposing ideas in his mind at the same time and make them work”
(qtd. in Pacheco 50).
A survey of the criticism forty years after the initial success of Painted
Bronze has shown that the most compelling of the remarks encompassed both the
formal and extra-artistic content of Johns’ work. Early reviews of Painted Bronze
were limited to presenting Johns’ commercial success as evidence of the artistic
signficance of Pop art. During the seventies critics acknowledged the popular subject
matter while also discussing the formal qualities of the work in terms of the
modernist tradition. Some fomialist criticism emphasized the self-referential nature
of his work while continuing to conflate art that was popular and commercially
successful with aesthetic achievement. Accolades for Johns’ monumental success