“I’m trying to find a way to make pictures that don’t involve some of the ways that pictures traditionally function.”
— Jasper Johns
Beginning in 1972, Jasper Johns created his motif of crosshatched lines, experimenting with colors, patterns, mirroring, and reversals that he developed and re-worked over the next twelve years; the lines would soon manifest in a variety of paintings, works on paper, drawings, screenprints, and lithographs. According to Johns, the inspiration for his crosshatching came from "a pattern of slanted lines on the diagonal, a sort of cross-hatching that he glimpsed on a car that quickly passed him on the Long Island Expressway,” the artist recalled. "I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me – literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning."
The title Corpse and Mirror refers to the “exquisite corpse” drawing game adored by the Surrealists in which each participant draws a section of a body – or “corpse” – before folding it to conceal their work and passing it to the next player for further contribution to the body. The resulting compositions were bizarrely “exquisite” human forms created through free play, unpredictability and a spark of the unconscious, which the Surrealists so sought to utilize. As one of three prints Johns created in 1976 with the same title, the Corpse and Mirror prints demonstrate Johns’ similarly experimental approach to printmaking, as the artist deployed his mirrored crosshatches in an array of colors across lithography, etching and screenprinting. Such experiments illustrate Johns’ overarching skills in adeptly recycling images to new ends, an extension of his career-spanning interest in repetition.
In this iteration of Corpse and Mirror, Johns extrapolates upon his own crosshatch marks, reflecting a mirrored image of the forms across six quadrants to an effect that is both complexly kaleidoscopic and spatially harmonious. This controlled abstraction exemplifies Johns’ early rejection of the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, which prevailed through the previous generation of American postwar artists. Instead, the crosshatching schema Johns deploys in Corpse and Mirror is gestural without being emotive, a repeatable and ordered pattern that resists becoming strictly geometric or reductive.
