Work in focus: 'The Seasons' by Jasper Johns
Creation, preservation, destruction, quiescence
Saturday 23 September 2017 3 - 4pm
The Reynolds Room, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly
£8, £5 concessions.
Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’
Roberta Bernstein, independent co-curator of Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ explores the context, significance and meaning behind Johns's series of works 'The Seasons'.
The four paintings known collectively as The Seasons (1985-86), stand at the mid-point of Jasper Johns’s 60-year career and are among his most significant and revealing works. Besides serving as an allegory of the four seasons of the year and the four stages of human life, the paintings present a retrospective of Johns’s artistic and personal life. Painted at a time of transition in the artist’s life as he moved to a new studio and home, Johns partly modeled his work after Picasso’s autobiographical painting titled Minotaur Moving His House (1936).
On a special visit to London for the opening of the exhibition, co-curator Roberta Bernstein will examine how Johns draws from his own repertory of images and adapts details from Picasso’s works. The title of this talk refers to composer John Cage’s Seasons (1947), inspired by the traditional Indian concept of the life cycle.
Roberta Bernstein is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University at Albany, State University of New York and co-curator of the RA's exhibition Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’. Bernstein has written and lectured extensively on Johns and in 2003 she was guest curator and catalogue essay author for the exhibition Jasper Johns: Numbers at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is the author and project director of Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture, published by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute in 2017.