Jasper Johns - The artist as collector

Jasper Johns, born in 1930, is one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. His art is considered a precursor to Pop Art. Johns began making his iconic paintings of U.S. flags and dartboards in the late 1950s - the serial Flags and Targets made him internationally famous, and his works can now be found all over the globe. Only a small circle, however, may know that the artist is also a collector.

Collections of artists are often based on gifts or a lively exchange activity with colleagues. This is also true for Jasper Johns, but by no means for all of the works in his collection: he collected a large part with the sure instinct of a connoisseur, and by no means all of the works are by contemporaries. They include works from the 19th century to the present. Both extensive groups of works - for example, by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Willem de Kooning - and expressive individual sheets, for example, by Käthe Kollwitz, Marcel Duchamp, and Sol LeWitt, can be found here. Taken as a whole, the collection illustrates Jasper Johns' affinity for the medium of drawing in all its facets.
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel shows a selection of approximately 80 drawings from the Jasper Johns collection. The starting point is the theme of the human body, to which a large part of the works on paper are dedicated. The show brings together a variety of drawing expressions from Impressionism through Abstract Expressionism to the present day, and for the first time provides a representative insight into this unique collection.


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