Matthew Marks Gallery

With extensive new scholarship based on original research and interviews with the artist, Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Monotypes provides the definitive account of Johns’s groundbreaking work in an intrinsically subversive medium situated between painting, drawing, and printmaking. Some of his earliest monotypes, made in 1978–82, depict a Savarin coffee can filled with paintbrushes, the same subject as his 1960 sculpture Painted Bronze. As Johns said in a 1979 interview, “I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two: the image and the medium.” Other monotypes include subjects and motifs that have occupied his work for decades, including the Crosshatch monotypes from 1983, the Catenary monotypes from 1999–2001, and the Number monotypes from 2012–13. Among the most recent works are six monotypes based on a photograph taken by Larry Burrows during the Vietnam War. The source image depicts a marine in despair after a failed mission, his posture echoing that of Lucian Freud in Johns’s 2013–14 series Regrets or the figure in Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

Featured in this volume are all 143 of Johns’s monotypes, most published here for the first time. Susan Dackerman and Jennifer L. Roberts’s essays examine the artist’s innovative use of the printing press to create alterity, overturning monotype’s traditional reputation for subjectivity. Each artwork is generously illustrated in color and accompanied by complete cataloguing information, including technical specifications, provenance, exhibition history, and bibliographic references.