The most-discussed events of the fall art season, or at least the ones that generated the most buzz among people who still believe that aesthetic value is different from financial worth, were the late-September openings of the paired retrospectives, both titled “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.1 Conceived and curated by the Whitney’s Scott Rothkopf and Philadelphia’s Carlos Basualdo, the double whammy was supposed to take place last year as a ninetieth birthday celebration for the artist, who was born in 1930, but, like so many events, it was postponed because of covid-19 restrictions. The mere fact of the twin exhibitions, each a complete overview with a slightly different emphasis, provoked some elemental questions, rather like the ones that first encounters with Johns’s work raised for the distinguished art historian Leo Steinberg. One of his most engaging essays, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” tracks this initial perplexity. Steinberg describes Johns’s paintings from the mid-1950s to about 1962 in a manner as laconic and straightforward as the works themselves, asking such questions as “What does it mean?” “Why had he chosen to paint subjects of such aggressive uninterest?” and “Does this all mean that Johns is a respecter of what used to be called ‘the integrity of the picture plane’?” Ultimately, Steinberg becomes a believer. Mesmerized by the way colors, their names, and a familiar image wrestle