The flag that wasn’t one: Jasper johns and the art of painting the unthinkable

This gesture, seemingly simple, would upend American art. In an era of Pollock’s heroic drips and Rothko’s color fields, Johns chose to paint things everyone already knew—flags, targets, numbers—but in a way that suddenly made them enigmatic. His Flags and Targets aren’t images. They’re questions posed to painting itself: What happens when an artist takes an everyday object and turns it into art without transforming it? When representation becomes so literal it loses its meaning? When the act of painting reduces itself to pure tautology?

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01The studio of paradoxes: when art becomes an enigma

The first time Leo Castelli stepped into Johns’s studio in 1957, he stopped short in front of Flag (1954–55). The gallerist, accustomed to the chromatic explosions of Abstract Expressionism, fell silent. It wasn’t the technique that struck him—though the encaustic, that hot-wax paint used by the Egyptians for mummy portraits, had a hypnotic texture. No, it was the sheer obviousness of the image that unsettled him. An American flag, painted with almost mechanical precision, but with layers of wax revealing fragments of yellowed newspapers. Half-erased words: Korea, McCarthy, atomic. As if history itself were seeping through the red and white stripes.

Johns wasn’t trying to move anyone. He wasn’t trying to provoke, at least not in any direct way. His approach was subtler: he took objects already heavy with meaning—a flag, a target—and painted them as if they had none. The result was both familiar and deeply alien. "I wanted to paint something that was neither a representation nor an abstraction, but a thing in itself," he would say later. A thing that, paradoxically, only existed because someone was looking at it.

This fundamental ambiguity lies at the heart of his work. In Target with Plaster Casts (1955), a target of red and blue concentric circles dominates the canvas. But behind small wooden doors, like in a cabinet of curiosities, hide plaster casts: a hand, a foot, a penis. The work plays with visibility and invisibility, public and private. The target, a symbol of precision and danger, becomes the backdrop for a fragmented anatomy, almost voyeuristic. Is it a metaphor for the artist under fire from critics? A meditation on bodily vulnerability? Or just gratuitous provocation? Johns refuses to answer. "If I say it’s a target, it is. If I say it isn’t, it isn’t."

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02Wax and newspaper: an archaeology of the moment

To understand Johns’s radicalism, you have to get close to his canvases. Encaustic, that ancient technique, gives his works an almost organic materiality. The wax, applied hot, hardens in seconds, capturing every brushstroke in a granular texture, like fossilized skin. Beneath the red and white stripes of Flag, you can make out scraps of newspaper—1950s articles, refrigerator ads, obituaries. These fragments, half-readable, function as involuntary memory. They anchor the work in a specific time (the Korean War, McCarthy’s witch hunts) while making it timeless.

Johns doesn’t just paint over these layers. He lets them surface, like scars. In White Flag (1955), the largest of his flag paintings, the white wax is so thick it seems to absorb light. The stars and stripes are little more than ghosts, almost erased traces. The work evokes both a shroud and a blank page. "It’s as if the flag had been washed, or as if it had snowed on it," wrote critic Leo Steinberg. An image of purity—or of forgetting?

This obsession with layers, strata, hidden things isn’t incidental. Johns grew up in the segregated South, at a time when the American flag was wielded as a symbol of freedom by some and oppression by others. In painting it, he doesn’t take sides. He simply shows it. But by showing it with such precision, he also reveals its fragility. A flag is just a piece of fabric. A target is just a circle of colors. It’s the gaze that gives them meaning.

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03The FBI, Warhol, and the birth of Pop: when art becomes a scandal

In 1959, the FBI knocked on Johns’s door. The agents wanted to know: Why was he painting American flags? Was it provocation? A political statement? "I don’t know," he replied. "It’s a thing I see." The answer, typically Johnsian, satisfied no one. At the time, the flag was a burning issue. The U.S. was in the depths of the Cold War, and any ambiguity was suspect. Yet Johns refused to explain. For him, art didn’t have to be a manifesto. It had to be an enigma.

That enigma would fascinate an entire generation. Andy Warhol, then a commercial illustrator, saw Flag in 1958 and immediately understood something had changed. "Jasper opened the door," he would say later. "He took everyday objects and put them in a frame. I just took everyday objects and made them bigger." The difference, of course, is that Warhol celebrated mass culture where Johns questioned it.