TitleGreen Angel
Artist
Jasper Johns
(b. 1930)
Date1991
MediumColor etching on Barcham Green Boxley paper
DimensionsSheet size: 31 3/16 × 22 11/16 in.
Plate size: 25 11/16 × 18 1/4 in.
Mat size: 36 × 29 5/8 in.
Edition11/46
SignedSigned in graphite at LR: "1991".
MarkingsULAE blindstamp at LL.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, December 17, 1997
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1997.23
Label TextOne of the most prominent artists in America, Johns first became known for his use of motifs of targets, flags, and other everyday objects. Johns is largely self-taught, having only briefly attended the University of South Carolina and a commercial art school in New York. His career was launched in 1958 with a hugely successful solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. His close relationship with Robert Rauschenberg, NA, from 1954 to 1961 had an important impact on both artists' work, which would be influential in moving American art away from Abstract Expressionism towards figurative and Pop art subjects.From the moment of its first display, critics have been drawn into the mystery of Johns' motif known as Green Angel. Indeed, its presence in over forty paintings, drawings, and prints testifies to its importance in the artist's oeuvre. While Johns appropriated images in his artwork for decades, Green Angel is the first motif he has steadfastly refused to identity, revealing only that it is indeed a tracing of another image, and later revealing the source of the name. The term Green Angel refers to an iconographically mysterious figure in the sixteenth-century Isenheim Altarpiece that has no apparent formal relation to Johns's motif but that has produced scholarly speculation. Significantly, Johns has drawn from the Isenheim Altarpiece in other of his works, such as the figures of the reclining soldiers used in his painting Perilous Night (1982; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). While critics have questioned Johns's motivation in keeping silent on the source of Green Angel, he has stated that his goal was not to provide an art historical riddle, but to explore how knowing or not knowing the source of an image affects the way one sees it.
This print was the subject of its own exhibition earlier this year at the San Diego Museum of Art, which featured a set of seventeen proofs that reveal the process of creating the print. Besides the central motif, it also incorporates the cross-hatching and disembodied eyes, nose, and mouth Johns uses in many of his other works. While the source of Green Angel still remains a mystery, it has been suggested that it derives from one of Max Ernst's many images of birds. And indeed, the beak-like shape and its entwined form at the top and claw shape at right center do suggest many of Ernst's images. However, it is likely that the source is more obscure. Because the motif has been depicted by the artist in different orientations, upside down, flipped right to left, it becomes even more difficult to pin down its origin. And in the end perhaps it is more rewarding to heed the artist's intention and assess it at face value.
