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Everything looks better at the Menil Collection, thanks to Renzo Piano’s precedent-setting skylights, which were a strong influence on architects Sharon Johnson and Mark Lee in their design of the new Menil Drawing Institute. Modulated sunshine flows obliquely into this structure, purpose-built for the acquisition, conservation, study, storage and exhibition of modern and contemporary drawings—a sensitive medium that must be exhibited in controlled, low light. Two windows (currently covered) allow for indirect illumination of the spacious-though-intimate, 31-by-91-foot gallery, which houses the Institute’s inaugural show, “The Condition of Being Here: Drawings by Jasper Johns.” Unfortunately, the architects’ mastery of light, space and scale is not matched in this show’s
41 drawings, made from 1954
to 2016.
The Condition of Being Here: Drawings by Jasper Johns
Menil Drawing Institute
Through Jan. 27, 2019
Overseen by the Menil’s Kelly Montana, though initially curated by David Breslin prior to his departure for the Whitney Museum, the show overlaps with the publication next month of the Menil Collection’s “Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing, 1954-2014.” “Being Here” is the third and final in a series of Menil exhibitions devoted to Mr. Johns, and I believe it is a misstep.
It is easy to understand, even without the forthcoming “Catalogue Raisonné,” why Mr. Johns (b. 1930), an art world elder statesman, was selected to launch the Menil Drawing Institute—despite the fact that Menil Collection founders Dominique and John de Menil acquired only one Jasper Johns drawing during their lifetimes: the graphite-pencil-and-collage “Two Flags” (1969). An early darling of the Neo-Dada and Pop Art movements, Mr. Johns is both established and cutting-edge. His signature works, such as the numbers and alphabets and his riffs on targets and the American flag, defy as they redefine the realm and artifice of art.
Mr. Johns, who neuters his artworks along with their subjects, is a gamesman who builds sleek, ironic conundrums: Is it a flag, or a picture of a flag, or both, or neither? These Duchampian riddles apparently excite Mr. Johns and his cohort. To me, his artworks are only mildly interesting for their willful obtuseness, or for the unusual processes of their making, but not as works of art. But the niggling, chance confusions Mr. Johns’s works inspire are exactly the point, which makes them impervious to criticism.
Consider the earliest drawing here, the graphite-on-oil-stained-paper “Untitled” (1954), which Mr. Johns gifted to his lover and fellow Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg. There are two ways to see this drawing: “sheet” (every mark on the entire page) vs. “sight” (what Mr. Johns makes visible, through the mat board’s window). Observable is a dense, dark vertical rectangle over some vague shapes. Covered up are the margin’s graphite marks and smudges. This partly visible drawing is not really a drawing at all, but a mockery of the act of drawing, just as Mr. Johns’s worked-up paint and encaustic surfaces are a mockery of Abstract Expressionist mark-making, authenticity and bravado.
In other drawings, or, more correctly, records—the most direct works here—Mr. Johns applies oil to objects, rubs them on paper and then adds pigment to fix the oily impressions. These include a slice of bread, a human skull, Mr. Johns’s face and hands, his torso and his penis.
“Being Here” demonstrates a lot of variety. There are flags, numbers, alphabets and targets; photorealistic renderings of quotidian objects; collages; colorful striped patterns suggesting wallpaper, such as the lively, mixed-media “Corpse” (1974-75); and works in watercolor and ink on plastic. Some of these, such as “Farley Breaks Down” (2014), began as faithful tracings of a Life magazine photograph of a Vietnam veteran and then evolved into distorted, pooled and congealed mixtures of dried fluids.
Despite Mr. Johns’s range, however, all the drawings here ultimately, and especially collectively, cancel out not just one another but also drawing as a serious artistic act. The Drawing Institute is a mixed-use triumph. This show, like most the Menil mounts, looks elegant (and I eagerly await future drawing exhibitions here). But Mr. Johns’s anti-aesthetic, anti-drawing stance is a peculiar way to inaugurate an institute devoted to drawing.
—Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal. His book “The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art” (Basic) will be published Nov. 27.
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