Jasper Johns, Henri Matisse, and the flag in the bathroom.
If you intend to make art, better learn your craft.
Newsweek called to tell me they had received access to photograph Jasper Johns, the greatest living American painter. They also mentioned he was legendarily cranky, and did I feel like I could handle that? Of course, legendary cranks are my jam, baby!
Far from living in a drafty hovel, Johns had clearly done well for himself and inhabited a stately and enormous mansion just off the Park, on the Upper East Side. Sometime after we photographed Johns, the director Spike Lee purchased it. I remember being surprised by this, as I pictured artists living in Soho lofts, even if they were fancy and made-over. This stately domicile was on another level entirely; being the greatest living American artist clearly came with perqs.
I had cut my teeth on mercurial rock stars and had found that clearly respecting their time was the best way to engender their respect, or at least cooperation. In those days, we artificially lit almost everything, as film was slow and bad at rendering “real life.” That meant schlepping a ton of cases, having people around to do that (I’m going to be chatting with my subjects, I can’t be all sweaty, gross and out of breath), and mounting and adjusting lights. I liked to have at least an hour to mess around before the subject got anywhere near our set. That way when they got there, it was all about them and their time. If they wanted to shoot and leave in two minutes (or one, cf. Red Hot Chili Peppers) no problem, I got my shots. If they wanted to see the polaroids of my assistant and chat as if we had all day before finally getting in some snaps, that was ok too. The customer is always right to the nth degree.
My natural inclination would be to photograph him in his studio. But it turns out he did all his painting out in Sharon, Connecticut. I think we were told where to set up in and around the courtyard. This had nice day light and also gave me room to set up my own softboxes so fine: no fuss no muss.
When I was in college, in addition to painting and making art I studied a lot of art history. My dumb little explorations in acrylic bore scant resemblance to the great works I studied in museums and books. At the time, my father was married to an art restorateur who worked for the Phillips Collection in Washington. I vividly remember visiting her studio one afternoon. She was working on a Matisse (the Phillips may be small, but she be mighty) and had it out of its stretchers and frame. Having achieved the august walls of a museum, the Quai St. Michel was now hewing back to its roots, transforming from Art back to oil on canvas. I was studying Matisse at the time, so I was really quite stunned at seeing an actual painting by the great man himself, lying on a workbench in Georgetown looking not entirely that much different from my own work. While we were chatting, my step mother absentmindedly reached a (gentle, gloved) hand to brush a piece of dust off that canvas. Sacre bleu!I have trouble conveying the earthquake of that little gesture; a gesture that set the art/craft pendulum wildly swinging through my nascent artistic personality. One doesn’t just brush off a great artwork. But then how does one remove dust from a great artwork? Simple, with a soft brush.
Years later, getting ready to photograph perhaps an even greater artist, I felt that pendulum begin to swing again. We were set up, told our contact and got ready.I went to micturate and while there noted on the wall of the loo a small, maybe 8x10 print of that American flag painting by Johns we’ve all seen and had on our dorm walls. But wait, no, it’s not a print, it’s a painting, of an American flag done by Jasper Fucking Johns and is a work of supreme artistic importance, not to mention the monetary value. Hanging in the bathroom. It’s good to be the king. Not since that Matisse sitting naked on a table some years before have I sensed such tension between art and craft. Every great piece of art starts out as a piece of craft: something someone made. When things are routinely seen on walls of great museums, it can be hard to remember their roots.
I washed my hands, headed back to set and bumped into the great man himself. He took the opportunity to walk me back and interrogate me along the way as to how I came to be in his bathroom digging the flag painting. “Genial” is how I would describe him. Nothing difficult or mercurial about him. I don’t know why they would be, dude has a seemingly great lifestyle, but hey, artists be artists. We arrived on set, he asked what I wanted and I showed him some polaroids and explained myself.
We got down to work and he dutifully (if not happily) answered all my requests to put his hands on face or just chat.I generally try not to ask people to smile, but he did anyway. A range of emotions shows in the shots, but he doesn’t ever read as particularly put out. He either had his publicists well trained or was having a particularly nice day but I don’t remember him as anything other than a super nice guy. We got our shots, packed up and left. I slipped the American flag painting into a convenient equipment bag and made my getaway. I still have that flag on my own bathroom wall, and am wanted by Interpol for it. That part is not true. But the rest of it is my story and I’m sticking to it. Film at eleven: cranky old artist is anything but. Work on the craft and the art will come. And keep all your old sketches, never know, they might be worth something someday.
Terrific writing and nice snaps 😉. You be the man w the man.
Men can have RBF, too.