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Our 10th Anniversary Celebration

Jasper Johns: 41 Years of Prints

From the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation

June 5 – September 2, 2007

Docent Tours with Bobbie Lawson, retired CCU Art History professor

South Carolina-raised Jasper Johns, one of America’s most revered artists, has been credited with two major feats in the art world: as the artist who paved the way from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and Minimalism, and as the creator of the highest-priced work by a living artist sold at auction (his 1959 painting False Start sold for $17 million in 1988).

Johns’ art returns to South Carolina with Jasper Johns: 41 Years of Prints, a collection of 60 lithographs, silkscreens, intaglios and mezzotints produced from 1960 through 2001, on loan from the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation of Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1953 at age 23 Johns’ career as a painter began in relative seclusion in his New York City studio. Five years later he had a one-man exhibition at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery, which the director of the Museum of Modern Art visited. A few days later MOMA’s director returned, purchased three of Johns’ works for the museum’s collection and Johns’ career was launched. In 1960 Johns’ began working with Universal Limited Art Editions to create the lithographs Target and 0 Through 9. Once again, the art world took note, and Johns’ career as a renowned fine arts printmaker was launched

Jasper Johns: 41 Years of Prints covers the period from Target to works from the 21st century. The exhibit explores in depth what has captivated many about Johns’ prints: his exactness of line and characteristic clarity and elegance of his simplest drawn forms. Equally compelling are his works in shades of gray, exploring the visual and tactile dimensions that can be expressed in a single color.

In his paintings and prints, Johns depicted such familiar icons as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers, striving to portray these symbols as existing outside of their symbolic context. Thus an American flag, for example, would become solely a visual object, removed from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in and of itself, incorporating Johns’ use of textural effects and novel materials.

These images would pave the way for artists such as Andy Warhol, whose images of soup cans and other homely items would become the icons of a new pop culture. But more than simply a passer of the artistic baton, Johns is an artist who continually reinvented his art, from painting to printmaking and even sculpture.

Johns' interest in the artistic process led him to printmaking, which encouraged experimentation through the ease with which it allowed for repeat endeavors. His innovations in screen-printing, lithography, and etching are considered to have revolutionized the field. He continues to inspire other artists and other genres.

The exhibition Jasper Johns: 41 Years of Prints highlights not only Johns' extraordinary contribution to the art world, but South Carolina's contribution of Johns to that world. Although born in Augusta, Georgia, Johns was raised in Allendale, Sumter and Columbia, South Carolina. After studying briefly at the University of South Carolina, the artist relocated to New York during the late 1940s – and the rest is art history.

The Belger Foundation of Kansas City, MO has amassed a collection of 63 works by Johns, representing a total of 86 fine art prints produced from 1960 through 2001.   The museum's exhibition will explore this seminal artist's vision for printmaking and the working relationships he developed with printers who collaborated with him in producing one of the most significant bodies of lithographs, intaglios, silkscreens, and mezzotints in the last century.  

From Whence I've Come: Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture by Sigmund Abeles

May 3 – September 2, 2007

Opening reception: Thursday, May 3, 2007 from 5:30pm until 7:30pm

Docent Tour with the artist, Wednesday July 18th at 2pm

For internationally acclaimed artist Sigmund Abeles, home and heart are in South Carolina, and he displays both in a strikingly personal retrospective exhibit, From Whence I've Come: Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture by Sigmund Abeles, comprised of 46 works (plus artist sketchbooks) created over some six decades.

Abeles, who lives and works in New York City, is considered one of the foremost figurative artists in the country. His paintings, drawings and etchings grace countless museums and private collections around the US and Europe.

Although he graduated from the University of South Carolina, Abeles credits two other SC masters, painter Gerard Tempest and photographer Truman Moore, as well his mother and his visits to Brookgreen Gardens as the major formative influences in his artistic life.

Abeles began his career in the 1950s as a painter, but he soon branched out into drawings, etchings. His work is characterized by close observation of the human figure, often in domestic settings. Because of the emotional content of his creations, his style has been called “expressive realism.”

“I'm a figurative artist – but not in a straight representational way,” the artist has said about his work “When I look at a figure, I don't see just form; I see who the person is and what the person is feeling.”

Abeles notes that he likes his art to tell stories, and many of those stories represented in the current exhibit are intensely personal to the artist. Among them are several portraits of himself, his mother and father, and his son, Max, now grown, who was born prematurely and struggled for survival the first few months of his young life.

Other pieces range from deeply pensive – in works dealing with 9/11 and the Vietnam War – to whimsical. A sculpture titled The Life-Cycle: Toaster began its existence as a pink toaster given to Abeles and his wife as a wedding gift, which Abeles abhorred.

Though Abeles avers in his artist’s statement that he likes to think his work speaks for itself, he nevertheless offers a sort of last word in the explanatory panels accompanying each piece: “What I add to the art on the wall and pedestals is what I would tell you should you be standing beside me, taking in each picture or sculpture.”