Jasper Johns (American, born 1930). Study for Regrets. 2012. Acrylic, photocopy collage, colored pencil, ink and watercolor on paper.11 3/8 × 17 3/4″ (28.9 × 45.1 cm). Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph: Jerry Thompson
A regular Vanity Fair column is the “Proust Questionnaire,” wherein a celebrity is asked a range of questions, the answers to which are presumably revealing if not exactly Proustian in length: Tidy quips are the norm. (The column takes off from a questionnaire Proust filled out as a precocious fifteen-year-old.) A few years back, Jasper Johns, the man who “changed the course of American painting,” was asked to participate. His answers were laconic, bemused, and without grammatical niceties like punctuation and uppercase letters. When queried as to what form he would prefer to take upon being reincarnated, Johns replied: “must I decide before I die.” Some of the replies were telling. What is your greatest regret, Mr. Johns? “An absence of clarity.”
Now we have “Jasper Johns: Regrets” at the Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s recent efforts. That’s right: Johns’s drawings, prints, and paintings have bypassed the commercial gallery scene and been deemed “museum-ready” by no less an authority than The Behemoth of Fifty-third Street. Given Johns’s reputation and, lest we forget, the astronomical prices his work fetches at auction, how could MOMA not glad-hand the status quo? Johns is, after all, a lynchpin of the standard telling of twentieth-century art. Along