Wallace believes this notion of being seen, and perhaps even victimised, may offer us a key to a more private reading of Johns’ targets. “In fact, Johns major target pieces – Target with Four Faces and Target with Plaster Casts – encourage an active, physical response, since the spectator can (at least in theory) manipulate these painted objects by raising and lowering their hinged flaps, a movement that in turn conjures the image of an abstracted blinking eye. Target with Plaster Casts (1955) by Jasper Johns. “Entitled Target with Four Faces and Target with Plaster Casts they gave rise to several additional pieces in various media, all of them linked via the provocative imagery of the bull’s eye. “In 1955, Johns completed two works that stand alongside Flag as his most important early paintings,” writes Professor Isabelle Loring Wallace in our Jasper Johns Phaidon Focus book. Johns, who was born today, 15 May, in 1930, was an early pop-art pioneer, and understood how signs used in everyday visual communication could be combined effectively with more painterly techniques. Today, a target roundel in a work of fine art might seem fairly unremarkable yet sixty years ago, in a very different social and political climate, Jasper Johns’ Target paintings were freighted with hidden meanings. On the artist’s 87th birthday, we look into the hidden meanings in one of his best-known series of works As reproduced in our Phaidon Focus book What was the Target in Jasper Johns' paintings?
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