Jasper Johns’s Untitled (1998) was produced as part of The Geldzahler Portfolio, a collaborative suite of prints created in honor of Henry Geldzahler, the influential curator, critic, and early champion of postwar American art. Organized to benefit The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, the portfolio brought together works by artists closely associated with Geldzahler’s career and influence such as Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Frank Stella. The project was a personal tribute by the artists to Geldzahler in recognition of his commitment to support living artists and preserve contemporary artistic culture.
Geldzahler occupied a singular position within the New York art world from the 1960s onward. As the first curator devoted to contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was instrumental in establishing the reputation of artists who would come to define postwar American art, particularly figures associated with Pop Art and postwar abstraction. Calvin Tomkins described him as “the prime catalyst in the roaring drama that was the triumph of American art,” while Andy Warhol once remarked: “Henry gave me all my best ideas.”
JASPER JOHNS | (Detail) Untitled, 1998. Etching and aquatint, 29 7/8 x 22 in (76 x 56 cm)
Johns’s participation in the portfolio therefore carries a particular significance. Few artists were more central to the transformation of American art during the period Geldzahler championed than Jasper Johns, whose work fundamentally altered the relationship between abstraction, representation, and symbolism in postwar painting and printmaking. For this project, Johns contributed a work that featured elements of a persistent motif from this stage of his career: outlines derived from imagery found in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, which Johns first encountered during visits to the Musée d’Unterlinden in Colmar, France, in 1976 and 1979. This work, particularly the image of the fallen soldiers in the Resurrection panel, proved to be highly influential. Johns later explained that he was drawn to “the qualities conveyed by the delineation of the forms” and wanted to see whether the imagery could be “freed from the narrative” while retaining its expressive force.
The soldiers would recur throughout Johns’s work during the 1980s and 1990s, though often in fragmented or partially obscured form. As Elizabeth C. DeRose notes in Jasper Johns: From Plate to Print, the motif—previously secondary within Johns’s compositions—“emerge[s] as the main compositional focus” here. Beneath the outline of the figures are architectural floor plans, and the appearance of a trompe l’oeil sheet of paper seemingly affixed within the print itself that create what she describes as a “shifting perspective” that continually unsettles distinctions between figure and ground.
JASPER JOHNS | (Detail) Untitled, 1998. Etching and aquatint, 29 7/8 x 22 in (76 x 56 cm)
Johns’s repeated return to historical imagery feels especially resonant within the context of The Geldzahler Portfolio. The portfolio itself was deeply concerned with artistic legacy and cultural preservation, particularly through its support of The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, an organization devoted to preserving the work and archives of artists affected by the AIDS crisis. Johns’s composition similarly operates through acts of preservation and transformation. Rather than inventing wholly new imagery, he continuously reactivates and reinterprets fragments of the past over a period of many years.
The print also demonstrates Johns’s technical command of printmaking. Produced at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, the etching and aquatint achieve remarkable tonal subtlety, using layered grays, delicate linework, and dense black forms to create an image that continually shifts between illusionistic depth and flatness. Johns had long regarded printmaking as a serious arena for experimentation rather than a secondary medium, and his collaborations with Gemini G.E.L. remain among the most ambitious achievements in postwar American printmaking.
JASPER JOHNS | (Detail) Untitled, 1998. Etching and aquatint, 29 7/8 x 22 in (76 x 56 cm)
Today, Untitled from The Geldzahler Portfolio resides in the permanent collections of major institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Harvard Art Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the National Gallery of Art, the Princeton Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Yale University Art Museum.
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MORE DETAILS
JASPER JOHNS | (Detail) Untitled, 1998. Etching and aquatint, 29 7/8 x 22 in (76 x 56 cm)
JASPER JOHNS | (Detail) Untitled, 1998. Etching and aquatint, 29 7/8 x 22 in (76 x 56 cm)
JASPER JOHNS | (Detail) Untitled, 1998. Etching and aquatint, 29 7/8 x 22 in (76 x 56 cm)
JASPER JOHNS | (Detail) Untitled, 1998. Etching and aquatint, 29 7/8 x 22 in (76 x 56 cm)
JASPER JOHNS | (Detail) Untitled, 1998. Etching and aquatint, 29 7/8 x 22 in (76 x 56 cm)
Photography by Marylene Mey © Estate of the Artist
