Flags
Craig Starr Gallery
April 2–June 27, 2026
New York

Few symbols are more fraught than the American flag. Emblematic of both unity and divisiveness, it has been hoisted to signal pride in this country’s foundational principles of freedom and democratic representation but has also become a metonym for jingoistic nationalism. In 1953, when Jasper Johns returned to the United States from army duty in Japan during the Korean War, the Red Scare and the McCarthy-era witch hunts were at full throttle. A year later Johns took up the motif of the American flag, not for its political amplitude but rather for its use value in his growing repertoire of what he called “givens,” things in the world, decontextualized yet notable for their immediate visual resonance. He would go on to subject the flag’s elements—its horizontal stripes and canton populated with stars—to a vast number of material manipulations. His expansive, multifaceted rehearsing of this single motif is stunningly in evidence in Craig Starr’s thoughtfully staged presentation. Spanning five decades, 1955–2000, the exhibition, organized in collaboration with Johns and his studio, comprises loans from both major institutions and private collections, including the artist’s own. Starr has organized the show in memory of the collector and patron Agnes Gund (b. 1938; d. 2025), whose close relationship to both the gallery and Johns informed her curation of Jasper Johns: Crosshatch at Craig Starr in 2019.

To move through this low-lit environment is to experience the richness of Johns’s varied treatments of a single motif, each iteration a unique physical repository of his shifting artistic modalities. His canonical origin story of the motif is simply, “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and went out and bought the materials to begin it.” He would later remark of the American flag, “I knew it was a flag, and had used the word flag; yet I had never consciously seen it.” Paradoxically, he would achieve this conscious seeing by means of tactile processes. His first Flag (1954–55) is not so much a painting of a flag as a construction of one, an object whose “subject” is coextensive with its surface, background and foreground collapsing into a single plane. Constituted as an aggregation of parts—plywood panel, graphite drawing on bedsheet, oil paint, and collage of torn fabric and newspaper dipped in molten encaustic—it was a strategic foil to Abstract Expressionism, whose pigments, as Leo Steinberg wrote, remained “the medium by which something seen, thought, or felt, something other than pigment itself, is made visible” even while the paintings are nonrepresentational. Despite Flag’s voluptuous, relief-like surface, authorial affect is withheld.

The gallery’s hang, organized neither chronologically nor solely by medium but near anecdotally, offers telling examples of that originating flag’s vast and various lineage. Johns’s spatial and material manipulations of color, texture, doubling, stacking, splitting, and spacing within the frame encourage a lively comparison of his technical explorations of material means. That the motif becomes more and more estranged as Johns extends his mastery over it is surely among the many delights of this presentation.

In the early Flag on Orange Ground (1957), the motif, outlined in graphite pencil, is positioned in the upper register of a fluorescent yellow-orange field, itself also surrounded by a smudged, barely perceptible graphite perimeter. Johns has filled in the canton in a faded aqueous yellow and has executed the alternating stripes in a pale, rheumy red and white, effecting the sense that the entire motif is nearly wiped from view. In another act of near erasure, Flag of 1955, a graphite drawing, is deluged in graphite wash, which Johns applied with both a brush and his fingers. The ruled stripes are filled in with dense alternating groupings of vertical and diagonal striations and areas of cross-hatching that exceed the perimeter of the graphite outline. Johns has admitted to mistakenly stenciling sixty-four stars rather than forty-eight (the number of states at the time). Centered on and almost filling the approximately eight-by-ten-inch paper sheet, the motif seems to recede; the three colors of the original flag are reduced to a monochrome of shifting high- and low-value gray tonalities, and graphite stains create a mistlike wash running across the motif and extending beyond it to the edges of the paper. In Study for Two Flags (1969), Johns drew two graphite images of the flag, each filling its own sheet, then joined the two sheets; these flags reverse the original flag but not each other, creating a strange mirroring/nonmirroring mise en abyme. Squiggles add textural interest, while darker and lighter impressions seem to mime the tactile effects of encaustic relief.