"The brutal truth of the work is that it is not a copy. The push and shove of the work is the leap from image to concept. The dynamics of the work is that it throws out representation."
With its sharp staccato strokes, controlled layering, and solemn phantomlike mystique, Elaine Sturtevant’s Johns White Flag from 1991 is both an ambitious imitation of Jasper Johns’s original White Flag and a monumental test.mes nt to the artist’s groundbreaking practice. Measuring roughly 80 by 120 inches across three panels, Johns White Flag is the largest Flag painting that Sturtevant ever produced, and its ambitious scale demonstrates her impressive mastery over Johns’s signature encaustic technique by this point in her artistic career. Beginning in 1965 and continuing over nearly three decades until 1991, Sturtevant produced a limited suite of 11 Flag paintings. Sturtevant’s Flag paintings together form a crucial chapter within her diverse oeuvre; as evidence to their importance, they have appeared in all major exhibitions of her work since her first solo show at New York’s Bianchini Gallery in 1965 and were most notably featured at her critically acclaimed retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2004. Sturtevant’s work trailblazed within the conceptual lineage that Jasper Johns established when his own Flag paintings broke down the boundaries between an object and its artistic representation, extending his philosophical project into new conceptual terrain as her replicas blurred the taut lines between an original and its duplication. Johns White Flag was painted at a critical juncture for the artist both personally and professionally: one year earlier, Sturtevant had made the decision to move to Paris, where she withdrew from the American art world in response to the criticism she received for her radical work. This abrupt relocation coincided with a shift in medium for the artist as, shortly after the present work’s execution in 1991, Sturtevant would turn away from painting entirely, focusing instead on appropriating installation art and internet-based images for the remainder of her artistic career.
RIGHT: Johns White Flag INSTALLED IN STURTEVANT STURTEVANT AT THE GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC IN 1994. Art © Estate Sturtevant, Paris
Technique is crucial. It has to look like a Johns flag so that when you see it you say, ‘Oh that’s a Johns flag,’ even though there’s no force there to make it look exactly like a Johns. Quite the opposite—the characteristic force is lacking. So when you realize it’s not a Johns, you’re either jolted into immediately rejecting it, or the work stays with you like a bad buzz in your head. You start thinking, ‘What is going on here?’
In his 1955 White Flag, Jasper Johns drained the national flag of its patriotic colors and divided its structure into three separate but conjoined parts, successfully abstracting the American symbol of its familiar features and achieving a ghostly representation that is dissonant but still identifiable. Expanding upon Johns’ conceptual pursuit, Sturtevant’s Johns White Flag accomplishes the same feat but with a pre-existing artwork rather than a cultural symbol. Sturtevant deliberately created duplicates that resembled the original and yet remained carefully inexact, explaining “Technique is crucial. It has to look like a Johns flag so that when you see it you say, ‘Oh that’s a Johns flag,’ even though there’s no force there to make it look exactly like a Johns. Quite the opposite—the characteristic force is lacking. So when you realize it’s not a Johns, you’re either jolted into immediately rejecting it, or the work stays with you like a bad buzz in your head. You start thinking, ‘What is going on here?’” (Sturtevant cited in an interview with Peter Halley, Index Magazine, 2005) Johns White Flag is especially effective within this conceptual framework because Johns’s original White Flag of 1955, now held in the collects ion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reached a breakthrough moment in his exploration of semiotics and perception for also prompting viewers to confront this same question.
In the present work, lush arrays of dripped wax accumulate over nimbly scattered brushstrokes, creating a ghostly layer that varies in opacity before a classic background of tightly ordered stars and stripes. In the brief unpainted moments within the thickly encrusted impasto, tantalizing glimpses of the newspaper underlayer appear from beneath, revealing the raw materiality of the densely collaged background. If Jasper Johns’s 1955 White Flag first challenged our recognition of the familiar American flag by making it strange, nearly four decades later, Sturtevant’s 1991 replica now complicated our recognition of the iconic monochrome original by mirroring its technique and aesthetic with comparable magnificence. In doing so, Sturtevant activates by sight the uncertain moments of slippage between one’s memory of the familiar and one’s acceptance of the new, launching the phenomenological dialogue that Johns began into broader ideas of artistic consumption, authorship, and circulation.
Johns White Flag reflects the conceptual rigor that unite the overarching oeuvre of paintings, sculptures, and installations that Sturtevant has produced since the 1960s as she replicated now-iconic pieces by many of her better-known male contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Sturtevant’s bold iconoclasm probed theoretical underpinnings of artistic authorship and reception, and, at its t.mes , was as conceptually revolutionary as it was provocative, stepping on the toes of many artists as she mastered a sweeping repertoire of techniques and media to copy their styles with daring panache. Fundamentally, Sturtevant’s avant-garde also mimics in its very conceptual basis of Jasper Johns’ ultimate practice: to depict, in Johns’ famous words, “things the mind already knows.” In Johns’s paintings of familiar objects, he blurred traditional distinctions between a thing and the representation of that thing, stating “I am concerned with a thing’s not being what it was, with its becoming something other than what it is, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with the slipping away of that moment.” (Johns cited in an interview with G. R. Swenson, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art). But whereas Johns mined the world of its recognizable cultural symbols such as Flags, Targets, and Numbers, Sturtevant turned her eye towards the quintessential images of the art world of her t.mes . By replicating original work or, if you will, “art the mind already knows”, Sturtevant cleverly continued the legacy of appropriation art inaugurated by Duchamp when his ready-mades assertively repurposed objects as art, allowing her to solidify a vital link between Pop Art and the Pictures Generation of Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman.
Though Sturtevant’s appropriation privileged process over precision, she maintained a reputation among her artist peers for her impressive abilities to replicate their works near exactly, a feat reflected nowhere better than in the legendary story behind Robert Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit. In 1955, Rauschenberg submitted Short Circuit for an exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1955, incorporating works in his combine composition from artist friends Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Stan VanDerBeek, and Susan Weil. Ten years later, when Rauschenberg reported to Johns that the miniature Flag painting he had made for the combine was stolen, Johns allegedly responded with two words: “Call Elaine.” At this request, Sturtevant promptly replaced the original by recreating a new Flag, which remains affixed inside Rauschenberg’s historic combine to this day as it stands in the collects ion of the Art Institute of Chicago, while the Johns’s original has never been found.
Today, Sturtevant, who received the Golden Lion award for Lifet.mes Achievement in 2011, is celebrated by critics and curators as “the mother of appropriation art,” a renegade artist who boldly copied others in her thrillingly irreverent and relentless commitment to challenge artistic conventions. As Peter Eleey, curator of Sturtevant’s major retrospective at the MoMA in 2014, stated, “she is the first postmodern artist – before the fact – and also the last.” A grand and ghostly emblem of Sturtevant’s enigmatic presence and radically conceptual intervention in the art of her t.mes , Johns White Flag is a prime example of her ambitious career and talent as, ironically, Contemporary Art’s most original duplicator.