Jasper Johns valuation
Painted the American flag in encaustic in 1954 and made everything after it possible.
Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930 and painted Flag in 1954 and 1955 after dreaming of it: newspaper collage soaked in hot wax and pigment, an object that is simultaneously a picture of a flag and a flag.
What a work by Jasper Johns is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930 and painted Flag in 1954 and 1955 after dreaming of it: newspaper collage soaked in hot wax and pigment, an object that is simultaneously a picture of a flag and a flag. Targets, numbers, letters and maps followed, all of them things, as he put it, the mind already knows. He shared his life and studio thinking with Robert Rauschenberg for six years, worked closely with Cage and Cunningham, and has continued through the crosshatch paintings, the Seasons and five decades of exceptional printmaking.
The printmaking is where most sellers encounter him, and it is a serious body of work in its own right: lithographs, etchings, screenprints and lead reliefs made with Universal Limited Art Editions and Gemini G.E.L. across sixty years, catalogued by Field and by ULAE, usually in editions of thirty to eighty and frequently in multiple states of the same image. Identifying the exact state, edition and publisher is the whole task. Encaustic works have particular conservation requirements, since wax remains sensitive to heat indefinitely.
The catalogues raisonnés, and Mind/Mirror
Johns's work is unusually well catalogued. The catalogue raisonné of painting and sculpture, five volumes directed by Roberta Bernstein, was published by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute in 2017, and a separate catalogue by Susan Dackerman and Jennifer L. Roberts records all 143 monotypes he made between 1954 and 2015, most of them published there for the first time. A painting, sculpture or monotype that does not appear in these volumes needs very careful explanation.
In 2021 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art staged a joint retrospective, Mind/Mirror, with close to five hundred works across the two museums: paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints, many from his own collection and shown publicly for the first time.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
