Gray Areas: Artists on Jasper Johns

“It may be a great work of his to have brought doubt into the air that surrounds art.” Jasper Johns wrote these words in A.i.A.’s July/August 1969 issue, for a remembrance of Marcel Duchamp, who had died the previous year. Perhaps the most significant heir to Duchamp’s legacy, Johns took up the doubt in the air around art in his early works of the 1950s and set about working through it. Since then he has continued to devise ways of approaching meanings, materials, and art