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Why People Still Get Worked Up About Jasper Johns’s ‘Flag’ Painting

His flag paintings now fetch hundreds of millions of dollars.

(Editor’s note: This article was originally published on February 21, 2018.) Defined by motifs that occur throughout his body of work, including targets and numbers, Jasper Johns’s career began with Flag, which sparked a revolution when it appeared in 1958. The art world was nearly a decade deep in Abstract Expressionism when this 3.5-by-5-foot encaustic replica of the Stars and Stripes turned up at the Leo Castelli Gallery. In an auspicious debut, Johns sold three paintings (two targets and a numeral), to Alfred Barr, founding director of MoMA. It was rumored the museum wanted to purchase Flag but were concerned about its political overtones.

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“MoMA was worried that the flag would be seen as a complicated gesture inside of America at that time, that people would be confused as to what Johns was doing as either a patriotic act or its opposite,” the show’s co-curator Ed Schad told Observer about the museum’s attempt to obtain the work by asking architect, Philip Johnson (long associated with MoMA), to purchase........

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