About This Artwork
Jasper Johns
American, born 1930
Perilous Night1982
Higgins ink on frosted mylar
1,004 x 2,400 mm
Through prior gift of Mary and Leigh Block; Harold L. Stuart Endowment, 1989.82
Prints and Drawings
Not on Display
Perilous Night refers to two of Jasper Johns’s preoccupations: the 16th-century artist Matthias Grünewald (German, c. 1475/80–1528) and the contemporary musician John Cage (American, 1912–1992). On the left, Johns traced two terror-stricken Roman soldiers from the Resurrection panel of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1515), which he reversed and turned 90 degrees. On the right, he depicted pages from the score of Cage’s Perilous Night covered by a shadowy face. Cage titled the composition after the old Irish myth “The Perilous Bed,” which concerns a bed that stands on a floor of polished jasper. As with much of Johns’s work, this drawing is filled with personal and historical references, and its creation coincided with a decade of self-study and the introduction of conspicuously personal imagery.