"Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.", Jasper Johns, sketchbook, 1964
Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, and one of the central figures of postwar American art. Born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina, he graduated as valedictorian from his high school and briefly attended the University of South Carolina before moving to New York and enrolling at Parsons School of Design. After service in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he returned to New York in 1953, met the painter Robert Rauschenberg shortly afterward, and over the next several years produced the body of paintings of American flags, targets, numbers, alphabets, and maps that opened the path from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and Neo-Dada.
His first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 was an immediate critical and commercial success, and the work was acquired by major American museums almost at once. He has since received the Golden Lion at the 1988 Venice Biennale (for the U.S. Pavilion exhibition), the National Medal of Arts in 1990, the Praemium Imperiale of the Japan Art Association in 1993, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2011 — making him the first painter or sculptor to receive that honor since Alexander Calder. His 1958 painting Flag sold in a 2010 private transaction for a reported $110 million, then a record price for a work by a living artist. His paintings, sculpture, and prints are held in essentially every major American collection of postwar art, including the National Gallery of Art (which holds approximately 1,700 of his prints, the largest single-institution holding of his work), the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate.