Artists in Reflection: New at Sackler

When viewing the later works of Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, and Willem de Kooning in the current exhibit at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum, lateness itself assumes striking importance. In contrast to modernists recognized for one definitive style--like Barnett Newman and Pollock--Johns, Serra and de Kooning eschew a signature style, instead favoring a perpetually regenerating dynamism.

Jasper John, Richard Serra and

Willem de Kooning

Arthur M. Sackler Museum

Through August 9, 1992

Johns, reknowned for paintings like the Flag (1954), marked the transition of American art from the Abstract Expressionism of the '40s and '50s to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. His abstract canvases of the late 1960s, replete with real brooms, rulers and kitchen utensils, recall the iconography of Surrealists like Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst.

Johns' works from the last two decades at the Sackler continue some of those past interests: news-print as Surrealist collage in the Dutch Wives and the self-referentiality of reproducing his own earlier prints in the painting Untitled 1984. Critics have often noted Johns' latent interest in sensuous matter and conceptual paradox; those interests now reign supreme, as the older Johns contemplates the failure of the erotic, in addition to the link between sex and death (especially in the Tantric Details, 1979).

De Kooning, a generation older than Johns, seems less obsessed with irony in his waning years than he is with gesture and scale. These untitled works produces at his studio in the Hamptons are being shown for the first time at the Sackler. They reveal an increase in serenity and a shift from the erotic intensity of his early work to a poetic sense of romantic dreamscape.

Richard Serra also seems to have grown more subtle with age. He is one of America's most notorious artists, thanks to his Tilted Arc sculpture commissioned by the Federal Government. None of the antagonism or intrusiveness of his steel and lead sculpture appears in this set of paint-stick creations. Like his Icelandic series on display at the Museum of Modern Art, these "drawings" do not demand but simply invite our musing, our quiet and unrestrained submission to atmosphere.

De Kooning once remarked: "I got into painting in the atmosphere I wanted to be in. It was like the reflection of light. I reflected upon the reflections on the water, like the fishermen do. They stand there fishing. They seldom catch any fish, but they like to be by themselves for an hour. And I do that almost every day."

It is in these later works that de Kooning, Serra and Johns make painterliness secondary and create room for reflection. The sober confidence in these works attests to their willingness to leave behind the formulas that brought them success and attempt new and varied effects. They continually change and transcend our expectations.