Pop Art Poppa

In 1953, an intense, taciturn 23-year-old Southerner named Jasper Johns arrived in New York from a draftee's tour of duty in the Army. Johns was an aspiring artist, and at the time all the art hipsters were emulating Jackson Pollock—a.k.a. Jack the Dripper, the man who painted on the floor using a dancing stick to fling pigment—or Willem de Kooning and his hyperbrushy abstractions. What Pollock, de Kooning and others created was called abstract expressionism, or action painting. To Johns, it suddenly looked like a dead end of macho self-indulgence. So in 1954, he destroyed all his own abstract works and headed in a completely new direction. One of the first things he painted was "Target With Plaster Casts" (1955). It wasn't a picture of a target, but the thing itself, a four-foot-square canvas collaged with newspaper and covered with red, yellow and blue paint. Was it abstract? Sure, in its way. Was it expressionist? Yes, delicately—the touch of the artist's hand on the surface is delicious. It was also representational—of something right off the archery range. But most of all, the painting was revolutionary. "Target" was pop art, and it arrived several years before anyone had seen a series of inert, deadpan paintings of soup cans by a guy named Andy Warhol. (Click title above for full Newsweek Article) Irish Art