Johns is the painter who, more than any other single artist, ended the moment of Abstract Expressionism in American art and opened the question that has occupied painting ever since: what happens when the picture's subject is an emblem so familiar that it can no longer be seen as a thing in the world, but only as a thing in itself?
Johns came to art from a small-town Southern background. His childhood in South Carolina, the practical economic constraints of his early life, and his decision to leave the University of South Carolina for the larger possibilities of New York placed him at the centre of postwar American art at a particular moment in his early twenties. The Parsons enrollment was brief; military service during the Korean War interrupted it, and his return to New York in 1953 began the period that would reshape his life.
The relationship with Rauschenberg was both personal and artistic, and through Rauschenberg he entered the orbit of the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham — a circle in which the dominant assumptions of Abstract Expressionism were being actively questioned. The paintings he began making in 1954–1955 — the first encaustic American flags, painted over collaged newsprint and built up in a dense, almost sculptural surface — were unlike anything else then being produced in New York. The flag, the target, and the other "things the mind already knows" that he selected as his subjects were chosen precisely because they were so familiar that the painter could work the surface without being held to questions of likeness or invention; the painting could be a flag, but it could also be just paint, just a surface, just an object, just a thing.
Leo Castelli's chance visit to Rauschenberg's studio in 1957 brought Johns to the dealer's attention; the resulting first solo show became one of the legendary debuts in postwar American art history, with the Museum of Modern Art and other major institutions acquiring work directly from the exhibition. Within a few years Johns was being read as the leading artist of his generation alongside Rauschenberg, and the framework of Pop, Neo-Dada, and the broader move into objecthood and the everyday was being built in part around his example.
His mature career has extended that early breakthrough across an extraordinary range of media. The encaustic and collaged paintings of the 1950s were followed by the cast Ballantine Ale cans and other sculpture-object works of the early 1960s, the Crosshatch paintings of the 1970s, the Seasons paintings of the 1980s, and the long, layered, autobiographical work of the 1990s and after. He has also produced one of the most substantial bodies of printmaking in American art, working with Universal Limited Art Editions and other major print workshops over a half century.
His position today is secure at the highest level. He is widely regarded as one of the two or three most important American artists of the second half of the twentieth century, and the questions his early paintings opened — about subject, sign, surface, and the relationship between the work of art and the things of the world — continue to define a substantial portion of contemporary practice. He remains a working artist into his nineties.