I ALWAYS ASSUMED that Jasper Johns painted In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara, 1961, to memorialize the poet whose name is stenciled at the bottom of the canvas and whose poem lends the painting its granite title. But after seeing the work again at the recent Johns exhibition, I checked the dates and realized that the artist finished it five years before O’Hara died. I couldn’t quite believe it at first—so many of the meanings I’d projected onto the work were thrown back at me—and then I had to start scraping off interpretations and understanding the painting according to a new set of terms.This was particularly difficult because, dates aside, the painting has a mournful air (the words DEAD MAN are just legible on its surface), and moreover, it marks a transition in Johns’s oeuvre, leaving behind the flags, targets, and maps—the “things the mind already knows,” as the artist once put it—for a realm equal parts abstract and oblique. Indeed, In Memory shares affinities with Johns’s earlier paintings but only to undercut them: It is shaped and structured like a US flag, except here there are no stars and stripes, and instead of mottled red, white, and blue, the composition is patchy with ashen gray. Where the surfaces of Johns’s previous paintings had been thick with encaustic wax, In Memory’s paint, especially on the left side of the canvas, is runny and thin. One can’t help but feel that a system has broken down, and this feeling is heightened by the two brass hinges in the painting’s middle, which allow the work to close inward, altarlike. The title, too, rings out like an epitaph engraved on a crypt, unknown sentiments stashed inside: Though the curators of the Whitney exhibition claim to know what’s there—evidence of the artist’s breakup with Robert Rauschenberg—as Johns put it in a 1989 interview, “I have always thought that everybody would want to explain a feeling. . . . I haven’t done it though.” So what Johns was doing here was not expression but paying homage to O’Hara and O’Hara’s work, its truck with play and secrets, and signaling an investment in a common project that elides blatant subject matter and “open” content. (A couple of years later, in 1963, the two men worked on a print together that shows a face and hands pressed up against a surface, as if desperate to get out.) The beginning lines of O’Hara’s poem, which first appeared in Evergreen Review in 1958, show deep affinities with Johns’s oeuvre:
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
The closeness between the subjects in O’Hara’s poem and the figures in Johns’s earlier paintings is overwhelming: Johns’s work, too, had used stars and numerals, as well as letters, maps, and targets, to get him “through the streets”—they are signs of the artist’s “quietness”—and yet he incorporates novel techniques in this painting: Quietness now looks different. But perhaps, like O’Hara, Johns felt a need to protect himself “from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons.” A new painterly idiom was required. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Dickinson wrote—and yet at least one component of Johns’s painting appears remarkably straightforward: the fork and spoon bound together and hanging from a kinked wire hanger screwed at the top left of the canvas. Scratching a faint curve in the painting’s surface, these dangling things—they hover somewhere between readymades and objets trouvés—lend the painting an air of mystery precisely because they are so literal, so mundane, so there. But what are they doing there? They suggest hunger and sustenance, yes, but also manners and comportment: the types of things people use to live their lives. One might say the same of alphabets, flashlights, and maps.
Shockingly, of course, O’Hara did die a short five years after Johns completed In Memory, in the summer of 1966, aged forty, struck by a dune buggy on Fire Island. Afterward, a group of artists honored the poet with a portfolio of prints published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where O’Hara worked as a curator. While Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Rauschenberg, among other contributors, paid homage by working in the margins of O’Hara’s poems, Johns returned to the motif of flatware he’d established in his 1961 painting, except that this time he added a knife and laid out the utensils as if he were setting a table. Four preparatory studies on display at the Whitney demonstrate some of the options he was considering: One diligently renders the dangling fork and spoon from the original painting; another describes a spoon in an inky field of black; and the remaining two, those closest to the final print, place fork on the left and knife and spoon on the right, exactly as one would for dinner, a sea of black ink filling the space between (it seems significant that there’s nothing to eat here). As in Johns’s target, map, and flag paintings, there’s a one-to-one relationship between subject and support: The place setting, covering the entire surface, is the work, a fact made literal when one considers that the final print, produced for a loose-leaf book, was meant to be held horizontally in a viewer’s hands. The reappearance of the motif in the 1966 print encourages one to consider what the utensils might have meant for Johns in 1961, both in relationship to O’Hara and in his work more generally: He would return to these tools in many paintings of the 1960s and ’70s, including Untitled (Gray Painting with Spoon), 1962; Voice, 1964–67; Screen Piece, 1967; and Dancers on a Plane, 1979. Fork, knife, and spoon are everyday items, yes—but what does everyday mean exactly? And is there some relationship between these common objects and the work of mourning, which, now emphatically, has come to the surface?
SOME TWENTY YEARS after Johns completed his print, the critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh asked Gerhard Richter a set of questions that offer a possible reading of Johns’s work and an overlooked tendency in post-’60s art more generally. Where many artists of the postwar period saw art as a general idea, and made it out of concept, media, environment, or some combination of the three, Johns and Richter took another tack, staying close to the discipline of painting. But why? Reviewing models from Duchamp’s readymades to Russian Constructivism, Buchloh asks Richter about the call to “liquidate the bourgeois heritage” and the desire to “construct a new autonomy” and wonders aloud whether the “praxis of painting” is a “handicap” to achieving such ends: “Shouldn’t one assume that there are other, more radical means that would further hasten the liquidation process and contribute more directly to the emancipation process?” In other words, times change, means change, and art should, too. But Richter is skeptical: “In this respect I’m extremely conservative,” the artist replies. “That seems to me like saying that language is no longer useful because it’s a bourgeois inheritance, or that now we should print texts on cups or chair legs instead of in books. I’m still bourgeois enough to eat with a knife and fork, and to paint with oil on canvas.” Knife and fork, oil on canvas: These are the tools that make up Richter’s being and define him. They are the language he can’t think without. History has made him who he is, and the forces of one’s formation can’t be dispensed with so easily—indeed, when they are denied and repressed, they haunt all the more. Richter isn’t necessarily a “conservative,” then, in the sense of trying to preserve the past, but he is skeptical of promises of liberation and radical transformation made on behalf of the new art. Johns’s In Memory suggests something similar; in fact, it literalizes the idea by bringing cutlery, and its associations with propriety and manners, into the scene of painting. While Johns thought long and hard about Duchamp’s legacy—he met the French artist in 1959 and made constant reference to his work—he ultimately decided to remake the readymade rather than take it as is. He returned it to the matrix of painting, registering the rupture of Duchamp by locating it in the space of tradition. Art couldn’t just be anything, at least not yet. It was still something rectangular, flat, laid out just so. Perversely, perhaps, painting for Johns was less about possibility than it was about rules and restraint. In saying this, I hope it’s clear that I am not claiming Johns as a champion for the bourgeois tradition of art. In fact, quite the opposite: By holding onto traditional forms, Johns was able to demonstrate that the bourgeois subject and its objects were in crisis. He wasn’t trying to extend them into the future. At this moment in his work, at least, he made paintings that were at once vestigial of and central to the culture—fresh relics, one might call them. So to return to where we began: The In Memory of My Feelings works (the painting, print, and studies) do form a kind of memorial, but they mourn not O’Hara so much as a whole conception of art—one founded on a belief in transparency and expression—that was passing. And passing takes time. Painting, like mourning, is not something one can simply wish away—it’s something one has to work through.
Alex Kitnick teaches art history at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York.