Magritte and Johns in LA -- but not in DC

Jasper Johns is one of the co-stars of the Magritte & Pals exhibition at LACMA. "Of all the artists of the post-war generation who absorbed the spirit of Magritte," writes Stephanie Barron in the show's catalog, "it is Johns who displays the closest links." The proximity of several Johnses in Barron's installation (including LACMA's own Figure 7 at right and the Broad Art Foundation's White Flag) makes a killer case.

Meanwhile, yesterday a Jeffrey Weiss-curated exhibit about Jasper Johns' 1955-1965 output opened at the National Gallery of Art. Rene Magritte is mentioned nowhere in the catalogue.

So how is it one major curator thinks that Magritte is central to Johns' work, while another apparently doesn't? Answer: For reasons not immediately clear to me, Weiss has excluded Johns' flags and numbers and so on from his show, allowing only four Johnsian motifs: targets, the stenciled names of colors, the imprint of the body, and handprints. Weiss knew that the exclusion of those works would be questioned, and addresses it in his catalogue essay:

"Isolating the structure of the linkage from the rest of Johns' production is a heuristic conceit, but the pattern it represents cuts through the center of Johns' activity, establishing terms by which process divulges itself to be the primary source for a poetics of the work."

Or, to put it in English: 'I have an argument I want to make, and because I can eliminate a couple of key bodies of work, I will.' Fine. Curator's prerogative. But the result is an oddly incomplete look at Johns' best decade; too much argument and not enough The Way it Was.

Back in LA, Barron's Johnses make her thesis sing: Certainly no artist in Barron's show owes more to LACMA's seminal Magritte. With his flag paintings Johns was saying "This is not a flag," but he was also saying, "Can this be a painting?" and then, "Can it be both a painting and a flag?" Like Magritte with his pipe, Johns is happy to leave his questions sitting there, unanswered. (In 1991 Robert Gober took Magritte's question, did something with it, and then by tackling Johns' questions did something else to it.)

I don't mean to imply that tying Johns to Magritte would improve the NGA show, just that the banishment of key works (works so effectively used 3,000 miles away) make up a befuddling omission. (More on this next week, I think.) I can't imagine that a curator would launch a show of mid-1960sThiebauds and leave out all paintings of pies, or that a curator would put together a Flavin show that included no diagonal lights -- only verticals or horizontals. I'm not sure what would be gained or learned from those exclusions. And I can't figure out what we learn about Johns' first decade by excluding some of his best works.

Previously: Magritte & Ruscha I,and a dream juxtaposition.