Catcher of the Eye

As shock is wearing off and familiarity is setting in, two facts are emerging about the proliferating art movement called pop. First, it has proved to be the most copied U.S. art movement abroad since abstract expressionism, now turns up in galleries from Rome to Tokyo.

Second, among its welter of practitioners, two painters have emerged as the undisputed eye-catchers: Robert Rauschenberg, 38, (TIME, Sept.18), who made off with first honors last summer at the Venice Biennale, and Jasper Johns, 34, pop's most painterly painter (opposite).

The two are close friends, but miles apart in temperament. Extravert Rauschenberg is now touring Japan with the Merce Cunningham ballet, for which he whips up a spontaneous stage set a night out of the jetsam of commercial products. More reticent, Jasper Johns plays the position of a mandarin: his aim is to make art about art. In his beach house on Edisto Island, S.C., and his Riverside Drive penthouse in Manhattan, Johns surrounds himself with art works of his friends, from Marcel Duchamp's Dada gimcracks to Andy Warhol's soup boxes, which he uses in lieu of extra furniture. He is a chess player and keeps a library substantial in such stiff favorite reading as Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus-Logicos Philosophi-cus. Johns also keeps on hand an inexhaustible supply of beer, which, in a way, has crept into his work.

Totem from Taboo. Johns's most known work is his 1960 Painted Bronze, apparently just two Ballantine ale cans on a pedestal. But look again, since, through the looking glass of pop, nothing is quite what it seems. They are, in fact, cast-bronze facsimiles of ale cans, one slightly smaller than the other. One is punched open and empty; the other is closed and solid bronze. Their labels are handpainted, and when lifted off their base, they provide a hefty gravitational surprise. They delight Johns pre cisely because they are false twins, an unequal equation, in short, a paradox.

Johns's followers even go so far as to see in them the transubstantiation of the familiar, a totem made from artistic taboo.

Johns's choice of Ballantine ale cans came from an offhand remark by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning to Johns's dealer, Leo Castelli: "Give that s.o.b. two beer cans and he could sell them." Johns proved he could (price: $1,000). Johns has also made art out of neon lettering, chairs, paint brushes and cast light bulbs in bronze.

Johns chose subject matter that was purposely flat and familiar--U.S. flags, targets, maps, and the digits one to ten (see overleaf}. But to him, they are no more commonplace than the lemons of the still lifes of yesteryear. Transforming everyday objects into images of uncommon beauty is unquestionably the artist's task, and for Johns the act of metamorphosis is full of magic. He says: "I am concerned with a thing not being what it was, with its becoming something else, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely, and with the slipping away of that moment." Saucy Delight. At first even a lunge at art seemed unlikely for Johns. He grew up in Allendale, S.C., and spent a short year and a half at the state university, where the lanky, laugh-prone Southerner got a smattering of art studies. But as an artist, Johns was largely self-taught. Not until he was 27 did he get his first show. It was a virtual sellout, and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art bought three works. Three years later, in 1961, he won an award at the Carnegie International, has since shown around the world and now commands prices in five figures. This week 70 works of his will go on view in London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, where enthusiastic crowds jammed a Rauschenberg show early this year.

All Johns's images share one common denominator: initially they are flat, two-dimensional subject matter. Most modern art since Manet has brought three-dimensional images closer and closer to the picture plane, like noses pressed against a window pane. Johns is totally uninterested in the game of perspective; his interest is in the surface of the canvas and in putting instantly recognizable symbols through rigorous permutations. He slathers and slurries his images with a random, painterly stroke reminiscent of the abstract expressionists. He rubs sterile graphic images in an artist's saucy delight of texture.

Primary Colorfulness. By blending concrete images with paint for its own sake, Johns was trying to mix water and oil, as far as the art of the last 30 years is concerned. He would superimpose 0, 1,2,3 through 9 in a single image, making unnumerical gibberish of the alphabet of mathematics. Or he would paint an anagram of the basic digits so that none would look the same. He tackled these flat, unsensual forms because, to make them the proper subject of art, he had to endow them with more eye appeal and more meaning than their original human designers had already given them. This, he believes, is a bigger challenge than improving on naturally made lemons or landscapes.

Johns wants to show how paintings are made. He paints on gray tone scales, color harmony charts, sometimes yardsticks which seem to measure the unmeasurable. He will paint with a roller, a leaf and his palm as well as a brush, admittedly to show various ways an artist can apply paint. In Field Painting, a scrabble of projecting wooden letters spell out the primary colors, but Johns has denied them by painting their shadows on either side in different colors. At the top, a neon R (lit by the switch in the work and powered by portable batteries behind the canvas) makes the painting's own illumination. Cans used to stir paint in, brushes used to apply it, and a roll of solder used in the wiring are hung by magnets that can be moved about to make different arrangements. The painting itself contains items used in making it, artifacts of its own invention.

Johns may paint as if he were a schoolmaster. Yet the wit and the wistful surface of his art are far removed from a blackboard lesson in the statics and dynamics of art engineering. He is a young man learning how to make art, going about it something like Einstein learning how to keep a checkbook. The result is unpredictable and intriguing, and might help in the final accounting of today's art.

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