How a Gray Painting Can Break Your Heart

I want to tell you how I feel — but something thwarts me.

I want you to see who I am — but not right now. Not entirely. Not directly.

This big, brash culture of ours is full of artists who put it all out there. Poets who bare their souls. Songwriters strumming through heartbreak.

And then there is Jasper Johns. Saturnine, wily, elegant, reserved.

The master of withholding.

Johns is 91 years old. Ever since the mid-1950s, when he painted an American flag just as it was, his pensive and poker-faced art has had a reputation (not entirely unearned) for self-containment. For withdrawal.

And in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” the two-part retrospective of his life’s work currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he is being hailed again as brilliant …

… but stoic. A grandmaster of American art, all the grander for his reticence.

I love his reserve, though I get why some people find his art frosty.

Many of his paintings can come across, at first, as a closed circuit of intellectual puzzles.

But I want to show you my favorite Johns painting, one that first appears as impersonal as any other — and which, slowly, delivers a roundhouse of passion and pain.

The title is “In Memory of My Feelings — Frank O’Hara,” and Johns painted it in the fall of 1961.

As he often does, Johns stenciled the title on the margin.

What are facts, and what are feelings? Can you trust either?

As a student, I was taught that Johns was the gravedigger of gestural abstract painting, the artist who put a lid on the macho posturings of postwar New York.

His achievement, the textbooks said, was to purge art of its expressiveness, paving the road to Pop and Minimalism.

And this painting of nearly monochrome gray — Johns’s favorite, the most ambivalent color — would seem at first to do that job. There is so little here: not much that invites a close read.

Not so. Beneath that gray are feelings that are irrepressible, uncontainable. And in this one painting, Johns shows how your one little life can become art that matters.

We can start by looking at what constitutes the gray field. From a distance, the painting appears to consist of four quadrants.

Three are brushy.

One is spare.

The zigzag marks here on the right are quite visible. Rather than cohere into a picture or an abstract field, the brushstrokes remain short and discrete.

A bit like Cézanne’s independent blocks of color.

The grays range from a dark, blue-tipped steel to a light, cindery ash. In parts beneath, you can make out phrases of red, yellow and orange.

Now here at left, you have the same M-shape brushstrokes, and some freer dripping, as well as bare, exposed canvas.

But as you go higher, the brushstrokes dissipate. The application gets thinner. It’s as if a quarter of the painting has been left incomplete, or maybe effaced.

None of these strokes add up to much of a picture. And neither do they have the sublime immateriality we associate with some of Johns’s immediate predecessors.

American painting had changed a lot since the previous decade, when Johns arrived on the scene.

In 1954, seven years before he painted “In Memory of My Feelings,” Johns was a recently discharged soldier living in a loft in Lower Manhattan.

Here, in a drafty studio on Pearl Street, with only a hot plate for a kitchen, he was making his first real commitments to being an artist.

He had come back from Japan and discovered an art scene in thrall to Abstract Expressionism. Painters like Barnett Newman were working big, and taking risks.

Mark Rothko and others broke down the distinction between figure and background, and dissolved the picture into transcendent flatness.

Instead of clean finishes, they favored big, visible gestures. Artists like Willem de Kooning saw the canvas, in one critic’s phrase, as “an arena in which to act.”

The art world treated the urgent zips and drips as gestures of liberation …

… and sometimes read Jungian interpretations into the impertinent brushstrokes.

Johns, then in his early 20s, liked what he saw.

He admired the gestures, and the suppression of subject matter.

But he could not take on for himself the brash performative mark-making that Jackson Pollock and others had established as the signature of American artistic ambition.

Temperamentally, he was too reserved to be the action man, though he had an intellectual reservation as well.

Gestural abstract painting seemed like a dead end to him. American painters had been throwing themselves at the canvas for over a decade. He was looking for something cooler, in more senses than one.

“I didn't want my work,” Johns later said, “to be an exposure of my feelings.”

And our Johns painting does seem ice cold, at first. The gray brushstrokes have little of the activity and personality you see in De Kooning or Pollock.

They feel automatic. Even, in the top-left quarter of the painting, expungeable.

The uncovered canvas at the bottom also kills any sense of abstraction as a transcendent field. This painting advertises that it is a thing.

And Johns doubles down on the painting’s anti-pictorial quality by affixing several illusion-cramping objects.

This hinge, for example. One of a pair, which — instead of functioning as hinges — bolt two canvases into a single, flat painting.

This fork and spoon. A little rusty. They snuggle together at the painting’s equator line.

The fork and spoon are tied to a wire, whose other end hangs from a hook that’s been screwed right into the painting.

Beneath the rusty silverware is the name of the poet Frank O’Hara, Johns’s friend.

It’s as if the stenciled name has to fill in, as best it can, the meaning that went lost in this abstract fog.

There are other letters down at the bottom. Partially obscured are the words “A DEAD MAN.” (Look for the raised letter A, stenciled just to the right of that vertical stroke of black.)

And, just beneath, the artist’s own alliterative first initial and last name: “J. JOHNS.” As if one’s identity itself could stutter, could hesitate.

It’s a signature that, with its double-J indecision, sums up so much of what made the early Johns so exciting.

His hesitant, yes-but-no stance revealed itself from the first major work of Johns’s career, painted in that loft on Pearl Street.

It was a painting of an American flag. Which sounds clear now. But which, in 1954, was almost heretically unexpected.

The 24-year-old Johns started with enamel paint. Then, out of frustration with the long drying time, he added beeswax to the pigment.

The wax and paint fused into a hard encaustic: a very old-style pigment, most familiar from Egyptian funerary portraits.

The brushstrokes appeared to be embalmed beneath the surface, as if painting itself were something deathly.

It had scraps of paper embedded in the waxy pigment, but no personal secrets to disclose.

The flag baffled people. It had the matter-of-factness of a Magritte, but none of the subconscious meaning of Surrealism. It was a painterly abstraction that covered the picture plane. But it was also nothing more than what it looked like.

After years of action in New York painting, this young man was reflecting. Philosophical sophistication was delivered with ironic indifference.

Is this a flag?

Or a painting of a flag?

Through the late 1950s, Johns painted targets, numbers and other commonplaces with deadpan literalism. But no motif recurred as often as the flag.

They were painterly …

… and collaged newsprint visible beneath the encaustic suggested some connection with the real world.

And yet the paintings were hard to look at as paintings, because they were so familiar as symbols.

In paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, he wanted to depict what he called “things the mind already knows.” They were meant to be recognizable as themselves.

They were both things and signs, representations and what they represented.

He had help from another artist: Robert Rauschenberg. Their lives were intertwined in every sense.

Rauschenberg lived in the studio upstairs from Johns on Pearl Street, and between them they only had one refrigerator.

Rauschenberg, a little older and more established, was also approaching art with a matter-of-fact double focus. His Combines, hybrid assemblages of painting and sculpture, were also privileging the world at hand over the depths of the soul.

Rauschenberg and Johns collaborated on department store window displays to make some money, and helped each other make art, too.

They were, in the most literal sense, part of each other’s work.

They were each other’s best critics and most reliable first eyes. “I felt kin to him,” Johns would later remember.

In the summer of 1961, the two young men went to Paris together. They both had exhibitions. They collaborated on a performance.

It was Johns’s first trip to Europe; it must have been wonderful.

By the time they were back from Paris, they’d broken up.

Later that year, at the Leo Castelli gallery, where both artists showed, Johns exhibited four paintings in shades of gray.

Some incorporated domestic objects. Their mood was bitter, and so were their titles.

“No.”

“Liar.”

“Good Time Charley.”

None of these can be said to be about Rauschenberg; Johns would never play his cards so openly. But the deadpan tone of the flags and targets had suddenly grown frostier and more biting.

The fourth one was the least angry, the most bereft.

Look again at “In Memory of My Feelings,” and the flag-like format is now hard to miss. It’s also almost the same size as the first flag painting.

This is the blasted flag, the flag wiped away. Suddenly, with a little biographical help, the gray takes on the tone of heartbreak, of loss.

The two canvases, hinged together, the same size but not quite identical, start to feel like lovers in a tomb.

The nearly invisible words “A DEAD MAN” start to feel like an alternate signature.

In 1964, John Cage disclosed that he’d seen a note in one of Johns’s sketchbooks: “A dead man. Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas.”

Using infrared reflectography, the historian Fred Orton found that, in the top-right corner, Johns had initially traced a skull with the help of a stencil before painting it out.

Skull against canvas. Painting as mortality — from an artist who was 31 years old.

And yet: Knowing this painting dates to the year of Johns and Rauschenberg’s breakup hardly furnishes you with a legend. You’re still locked out of the artist’s personality, his inner life. Anyway, venting romantic grief is not the same as making a major work of art.

There are no real disclosures in this painting, any more than in the poker-faced flags. If Abstract Expressionists splattered their inner selves onto the canvas, Johns coagulated his, reduced it, turned it in on itself.

Even the fork and spoon, nuzzling together like lovers asleep, are facing inward, not out.

The real key to “In Memory of My Feelings” is its title …

… which Johns stenciled with the words “OF MY” unfilled. Nearly absent.

Never before had Johns invoked a contemporary directly. And it was O’Hara who gave him a model for painting his feelings without spilling them out.

These days, O’Hara is grouped in with the poets of the New York School: John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch. But during his life, he was far more prominent in the art world.

He worked at the Museum of Modern Art, rising from the front desk to the curatorial department, and wrote on his lunch breaks.

(This double portrait of him is by Larry Rivers, and dates to 1955.)

O’Hara’s verse could be chatty, could be campy.

He shamelessly name dropped his artist friends — Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and also Johns, affectionately “Jap.”

But with “In Memory of My Feelings,” from 1956, O’Hara found a voice in which discretion could become a kind of disclosure. The masculinity of the New York art world could make room for more tender, less tortured, feelings.

“My quietness has a man in it,” the poem begins.

There are little Johnsian invocations of “stars” and “numerals.”

O’Hara’s narrator presents himself to us in a succession of disguises. The verse is dense, melancholy, full of subterfuge.

The disguises are ploys to protect his heart. And by the poem’s end, the narrator is undertaking an emotional purgation.

He is hardening himself by forgetting one lover above all, whom he misses so much it feels like a mortal illness.

Or not quite forgetting. Transforming, more like.

Turned into art. As art alone — sideways, secretive — love’s memory can be made bearable.

In 1967, a year after O’Hara died in an accident, MoMA published a memorial edition of “In Memory of My Feelings.”

Johns did the illustration at the title poem’s end.

In 1961, Johns discovered that he could best nurse his own heartbreak as O’Hara had taught him. Not through outright expression, nor through repression — but through sublimation.

In O’Hara’s poetry, he found what he had most needed: a conduit for his feelings to take artistic form.

Disguises, indirections, digressions: He sure isn’t laying it bare. But Johns, like O’Hara, was forging a pathway between disclosure and denial, a space to convert feelings into facts.

The gray appears blank, but its quietness has a man in it.

And that quietness is not oppressive, like the closet’s. It is a strategic quietness, with paradoxical power: unbearably sad because of what it does not say.

Even in all gray, this painting does not express Johns’s feelings; from the title on, it elegizes them. O’Hara did so with his usual excitability. Johns was cooler.

What he could not perform he had learned to mourn.

“In Memory of My Feelings” would later reveal itself to be, both literally and metaphorically, Johns’s hinge painting.

This was the end of youth.

In everything that followed, from 1961 to now, the puzzles would be both philosophical and personal, and feelings could be properly the stuff of art.

The symbols that once functioned as deadpan “things the mind already knows” could now become carriers of grief.

Each object rupturing the picture plane now felt like a memento mori.

The motifs would take on, if only quietly, the weight of self-portraiture.

The crosshatched paintings of the 1970s, more traditionally abstract than any that came before, still bristled with sex and death.

And in the gnarled later paintings, as the motifs expanded and the riddles got denser, there is always this same tension between feelings and facts: between the thing made manifest in paint and objects …

… and the joy or pain they carry within them.

He is still working, in a culture with less interest than ever in privacy. In which self-exposure is the most widely accepted currency and every artist or lover has to perform for the apps.

But Johns saw long ago that performing your feelings came with a price, one he could not pay. And so he found — and offered to us, in an achievement that can leave me speechless with gratitude — another way to be a public person with a private life.

On my visits to “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” I have usually had “In Memory of My Feelings” to myself. It’s a little too modest to command a crowd. It does not shout. It does not gush.

But if you go to the Whitney’s half of the retrospective, spend just a minute longer than usual with the gray.

Look, in particular, at lower right, in the quadrant of the dead man. “Looking closely helps,” Cage wrote in 1964. “Though the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love.”

Look beneath the steely up-and-down strokes, and into the muffled red and blue underpainting. Down here we see gray for what it really is: the dense indirections of an allegedly aloof master who has made his feelings into art since 1961.

Not black or white but gray; not an empty gray, but one freighted with color and life.

Make your absence its own presence. Speak low when you speak love.

Produced by Joshua Barone, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio, Gabriel Gianordoli and Jessie Wender. Find more in this series here.