"Jasper Johns' basic instructions to himself, penned in a sketchbook—'Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it'— reveal the overarching serial logic of his creative approach. His exploration of numeric figures began in 1955 and grew in intensity until about 1970; it is the motif to which he has returned most often, exploring it in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. Johns has taken advantage of the opportunity offered by printmaking to test multiple options, and pursue different avenues of exploration in his repetitive, measured transformation of the numerical subject."
—National Gallery of Art