Larry Gagosian, Jasper Johns, and the Strategy Behind a Landmark Show

Why did Larry Gagosian want to stage a just-opened blockbuster exhibition of Jasper Johns‘s paintings at his Upper East Side gallery in New York? “First of all, because I want to look at them,” he told Alison McDonald in a soon-to-be-published Gagosian Quarterly interview. It’s not an especially lofty justification, but it’s at least an honest one—and it sets the tone for the entire conversation.

In the piece, Gagosian talks fluently about the formal characteristics of Johns’s art—the way the 95-year-old artist works his surfaces, the way he wields his materials—but Gagosian generally doesn’t linger on the concepts behind the crosshatch paintings in this show. Instead, Gagosian is quickened, it seems, by what happens when you stand in front of these works for long enough.

The exhibition is undeniably strong. The crosshatch paintings, made between 1973 and 1983, are less austere than one might expect. Up close, they’re dense and worked, their encaustic interrupted by the occasional glimpse of newsprint or grit. From across the room, Johns’s marks loosen, and his grids soften. In several paintings, the crosshatches reveal shapes that feel half-figural; the image only resolves when you stop trying to puzzle over it.

In the Gagosian Quarterly interview, Gagosian positions himself squarely inside Johns’s orbit (despite the fact that Johns remains represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, as the artist has long been). When asked about first encountering the crosshatches, Gagosian doesn’t cite a catalog or a critical essay. Instead, he tells a story.

In 1976, he casually mentions, he was dating a dancer in Merce Cunningham’s company and followed her to New York. Through that relationship, he met Cunningham and John Cage, traveled with the company, and even played chess with Cage on a tour bus. It was during that period, before he had met Johns himself, that Gagosian saw the crosshatch paintings at Leo Castelli’s gallery during their debut in 1976. The art world proper came later. The memory is vivid, a little romantic, and revealing: Johns enters Gagosian’s story early, through proximity and experience. It also offers a glimpse of Gagosian the salesman, who may be second only to Mad Men’s Don Draper when it comes time to pitch an idea.

Gagosian’s show is less impressive for its thesis—it doesn’t really have one—than it is for the coordination involved in making it. Assembled here are  Corpse and Mirror (1974), Weeping Women (1975), and, most notably, all six versions of “Between the Clock and the Bed” (1981) all of which are owned by a range of top-tier collectors and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. This is the kind of thing that only happens when a dealer is as powerful as Gagosian, and has been around long enough—and traded favors for long enough—to make it possible.

In the Gagosian Quarterly piece, Gagosian talks openly about “digging deep” for loans and about the rarity of getting a second chance at a show like this. There’s no false modesty here, just an acknowledgment of scale and access.

The common assumption is that this series emerged directly from Johns’s encounter with Edvard Munch, whose 1940–43 painting Self-Portrait. Between the Clock at the Bed. prominently features a similar motif to Johns’s crosshatch. Because Munch painted that picture not long before his death, Johns’s crosshatch paintings have commonly been interpreted as a reckoning with mortality. But according to Gagosian, it’s “a common misconception that Johns’s crosshatches were inspired by the Edvard Munch self-portrait… but in fact Johns had been exploring the crosshatch theme for years before he encountered the Munch. But when he did, he painted six different versions of a composition inspired by the Munch.”

The paintings are built from short lines laid down again and again, side by side. Up close, you see the work in it: wax pushed around, paint dragged and pressed, colors laid over each other and sometimes scraped back. The lines don’t sit politely. Some are heavier, some lighter. Some feel rushed, others careful. You can tell where Johns changed his mind, or at least slowed down. Bits of paper appear in places. Sand shows up. Nothing feels decorative.

Step back, and the paintings change. The lines stop reading as lines and begin to move together. The colors blend at a distance. What looked rigid up close loosens. Shapes appear that weren’t obvious before: forms that suggest bodies, or paths, or currents. Then they disappear again, if you look too hard.

There’s another subtext here, one the interview circles without overstating. This is the final exhibition at Gagosian’s 980 Madison Avenue space, which opened in 1989 with a show of Johns’s “Map” paintings. “That was a very difficult show to put together,” Gagosian says, “but in the end, collectors and museums were generous and I was able to open this new space with this extraordinary body of work. It really put my gallery on the map, so to speak.” This year the gallery is moving to a downstairs space in the same building and winding down operations upstairs. “So the crosshatch show feels like a nice bookend in relation to opening with Maps,” the dealer added.

Still, within the industry, the show is also read through a more pragmatic lens. As strong as it is, some might view the exhibition as a not-so-subtle play to lure the 95-year-old Johns away from Matthew Marks. Would anyone expect less from an art dealer, much less from the ur–art dealer, Larry Gagosian? The show is revealing when it comes to Johns’s art—and potentially when it comes to Gagosian’s business practices, too.