Focal Points: Jasper Johns

"Nobody has played the game of the art world better than Jasper Johns" – Robert Storr, in conversation with Ben Luke on the award-winning podcast The Week in Art.

How can we interpret the work of contemporary artists? First released in 2024, Focal Points is a book series of essays, articles and reviews by acclaimed curator and critic Robert Storr. Expertly edited by art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo, and richly illustrated, it lends Storr’s illuminating insights into an artist’s practice and way of thinking across recent decades. Brilliantly scholarly, accessible and engaging, Focal Points offers fresh interpretations of the varied territory of modern and contemporary art.

This volume gathers, for the first time, Storr’s writings on the work of American painter Jasper Johns (b.1930). An artist internationally recognised for his encaustic paintings of flags, targets and maps, Johns’s ‘Neo-Dada’ works helped to formalise a shift in postwar American art, moving away from Abstract Expressionism and towards Pop art. Storr’s essays and articles provide a unique look at Johns’s practice and its continuing relevance. As Pietropaolo notes in her introduction, ‘Together, these writings … encapsulate Storr’s process of close looking at and prolonged thinking about Johns’s art, the result of a longstanding engagement that started back in the late 1960s … when he first met the artist in New York.’