ABSTRACT

In Perilous Night, a companion piece to Racing Thoughts, the familiar Johnsian melancholy darkens until velvety black absorbs all painted form. Nothing is sharply visible but the three casts of an arm that hang from the canvas side by side. In an untitled painting from 1988, the wall becomes a dark blue sky filled with stars and nebulae. Night seems less perilous now, yet the hermetic atmosphere of the studio persists. This dark immensity of sky is an enclosure, a flat surface inscribed with patterns borrowed from Grünewald. In the first of the studio paintings, Fool's House (1962), shifting tones of gray suggest sunlight finding its way through a bank of clouds. A tall canvas becomes a high, narrow window—but only for a moment. The austere vigor of Johns's brushwork flattens the sky's depths to a wall where a broom is suspended from a hook. From the picture's lower edge hangs a cup. A small towel, neatly folded, occupies the corner to its left.