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Corpse and Mirror II

A work made of oil and sand on four joined canvases, with artist's painted frame.
Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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  • A work made of oil and sand on four joined canvases, with artist's painted frame.

Date:

1974/75

Artist:

Jasper Johns
American, born 1930

About this artwork

In his work from 1972 to 1983, Jasper Johns used a distinct arrangement of crosshatched marks, traditionally considered a graphic method of adding depth and volume to an image or conveying the illusion of light in space. Johns first glimpsed this pattern on a passing car, recalling: “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.” Emphasizing the flatness of the painting, Johns’s cross-hatching is gestural without being emotive; in this sense, the technique extends his larger critique of overtly expressionist models of painting. Johns forged a new model of painterly abstraction, using a schema that is repeatable and ordered but not strictly geometric or reductive.

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Contemporary Art

Artist

Jasper Johns

Title

Corpse and Mirror II

Place

United States (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1974

Medium

Oil and sand on four joined canvases, with artist's painted frame

Inscriptions

Not inscribed on recto

Dimensions

Including frame: 146.4 × 191.1 cm (57 11/16 × 75 1/4 in.); 146.4 × 191.2 cm (57 5/8 × 75 1/4 in.)

Credit Line

Lent by the artist

Reference Number

7.1976

Copyright

Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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