Jasper Johns, Footman

Although the renowned artist Jasper Johns does not figure prominently in our current selection, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara, which we'll discuss this coming Wednesday, he does rate a few mentions in the index (pp. 315, 322-323 and 395). The last of those is the most significant:

"Jasper Johns made a sculpture of wood, lead, metal, brass and sand in 1961 titled Memory Piece (Frank O'Hara), in which a rubber cast of a foot in the sand was taken from a plaster foot of O'Hara's foot. 'I remember casting his foot on Front Street in my studio,' says Johns. 'I cast his foot and did a drawing for the piece, which included a cabinet with the drawers full of sand. At that time I had a house in South Carolina. I needed a carpenter but could never find anyone to do it. I think it was done after his death. But I gave Frank the drawing for it.' This was the piece referred to in O'Hara's letter-poem to Johns, written in 1963: 'Dear Jap, when I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand.'"

Johns, of course, is much in the news currently for the huge retrospective of his works ("Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror") that just opened at the Whitney Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here are reviews/commentaries from the Washington Post's Philip Kennicott and Sebastian Smee (the former concentrates on Johns' homosexuality, the latter more on his aesthetic) and the New York Times' Deborah Solomon and Holland Cotter. I'm planning to see the Whitney show later this month; not sure yet about going to Philly.