#5 from Six Lithographs (after Untitled, 1975) 1976
| Medium: | Lithograph, 11 aluminum plates printed in colors on grey Rives BFK paper |
| Sheet size: | 30 1/8 x 29 7/8 inches (76.5 x 75.9 cm) |
| Image size: | 28.75 x 28.75 (73 x 73 cm) |
| Printer: | Serge Lozingot, Mark Stock |
| Publisher: | Gemini G.E.L, Los Angeles |
| Edition: | 60 with 13 artist's proofs and 5 other proofs |
| Edition Number: | AP 13/13 |
| Signed: | In pencil lower right "J Johns '76" |
| Catalogue Raisonné | Universal Limited Art Editions 178 |
$18,000
Corpse and Mirror II 1974-75
Oil on canvas with painted frame
On the way to the Hamptons Johns saw a passing car painted with crosshatch patterns. "I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me--literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning," he said.
His first crosshatch painting, Scent, was in 1974. Critics have been fascinated with the structures and implications of these works that Johns painted
for a decade. His intended meanings are famously slippery. About the crosshatching he said, "Those stupid marks, they are not abstractions." His
paint handling is lavishly masterful.
Equally tactile are the strokes in this lithograph. Johns painted six lithographs
in part and whole from a photograph of a crosshatch painting Untitled, 1975) that he showed after a hiatus of eight years. The lithographs particularize relations of different sections of the painting to each other. Ours is #5.
To imply the waxiness of encaustic, he applied a varnish to some panels and not others. Each section is hypnotic.