By Paul Varnell

Contributing writer

In 1955, 25-year-old Jasper Johns seemed to burst onto the New York art scene with something shocking: a painting of an American flag. The painting was a direct challenge to abstract expressionism, which Johns described as “rampant.” Not only was the painting of an actual object—it seemed to reject the whole dominant theory that art was an expression of the artist’s personality and his artistic process.

In a later interview Johns said he made a conscious effort not to have his work resemble the work of any other artist. But he also had another reason: “In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. That was partly to do with my feelings about myself and partly to do with my feelings about painting at the time.”

No doubt some of those “feelings about myself” involved his homosexuality and his effort to avoid making that in any way publicly apparent. His well-known coolness toward Andy Warhol, for instance, was his hostility to Warhol’s conspicuous—indeed exaggerated—swishiness.

Over the years Johns went on to produce more than 90 paintings using the flag motif—flags in different colors, multiple flags, flags on top of flags, even a flag using the complementary colors so that after you stare at it for a long time then look away, you see the after-image in the correct colors.

Making multiple paintings using familiar motifs became a standard practice for Johns. Through the 1950s he included targets (beginning in 1955), letters of the alphabet (1956), sequences of numbers (1957), mislabeled splotches of color (1959), coat hangers (1959), overlapping digits 0 through 9 (1961) and maps of the United States (1961). Later still he added a flagstone motif (1967) and crosshatching (1972). In recent years he added “catenaries”—the arc a string makes when suspended between two fixed points.

Since Pop Art was slowly gathering steam in the late 1950s and early 1960s and Johns painted familiar objects, he was grouped with then emerging pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, James Dines, Warhol, Robert Indiana and others. But Johns resisted the label, protesting, “I am not a pop artist.”

Although the early categorization is understandable, Johns had a point. His paintings were meant not just to reproduce the images, but to offer variations on them, exploring the perceptual process. The perceptual intent became more apparent in later paintings that included optical illusions, eye-fooling effects (Is that a real piece of string or are it and its shadow both painted?) or even that flag that generates a correct after-image.

Over time Johns expanded his repertoire to including images from earlier artists, images from his own earlier work, optical illusions and personal references. He even indirectly alludes to homosexuality by alluding to the gay poet and art curator Frank O’Hara and the gay poet Hart Crane. Having initially tried to avoid revealing anything about himself in his paintings, Johns said, “I sort of stuck to my guns for a while, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.” It was, in short, a restriction that limited his creativity. He seems to have decided that he had something to say about the world—and about himself.

Some of the paintings even make reference to sex. Although Johns had early parodied the aggressive masculinity (and heterosexuality) of the abstract expressionists (“Painting with Two Balls”), later paintings refer to the “Dutch wives”—a board or other device with a hole in it used as a vagina substitute—and “Tantric Detail,” which depicts two testicles and the barely detectable base of an erect penis.

The present exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago titled “Gray” includes 137 entirely or largely gray versions of all these subjects Johns has produced between 1955 and the present. There are, for instance, 17 different gray flag paintings. There is, however, one brightly colored painting—“False Start”—which is offered as a contrast to a gray version of the same subject.

Art historian Barbara Hess, in her useful monograph on Johns, from which I have taken some quotations, points out that Johns once said that he used gray to avoid the “emotional and dramatic qualities of color.” The gray paintings, he said, “seemed to me to allow the literal qualities of the painting to predominate over any of the others.”

That is more than the woman who conducted the interview in the exhibition catalogue was able to get out of Johns, who reverted to his customary posture of claiming ignorance about his own work.

Johns says such things as, “I don’t know much about gray,” “I don’t really often think about gray,” “I don’t know how much I’ve used it.”

He agrees that gray is a color but then immediately says that “one also might think of it as the absence of color.”

How does gray differ from his other paintings using a single color? “I don’t know that it does.”

Are there other artists who have used gray in ways he likes? “I haven’t paid that much attention.”

At that point the poor woman must have been tearing her hair out.

The exhibition will be of keen interest to specialists in modern American art and to fans of Johns’ work. For most people, however, gallery after gallery of those 137 gray paintings will be more than enough. While it is interesting to see so many Jasper Johns paintings brought together, their most likely effect will be to make people grateful for those “emotional and dramatic qualities of color” in his other paintings that are, alas, not in this exhibit.

Jasper Johns, “Gray,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, 1955-2007. Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave. On view through Jan. 6, 2008.