Flag

The Stars and Stripes, life-size and edge to edge, built up in pigmented hot wax over strips of newspaper, by a 24-year-old who said the picture came to him in a dream. The bridge out of Abstract Expressionism: is it a painting of a flag, or just a flag?

1. 1
   The 48-star field, filling the panel

   The blue canton, top-left, with its grid of white stars, and the whole flag running clean to all four edges

   Count the stars: there are forty-eight, not fifty, and that is correct, not a mistake. The U.S. flag carried forty-eight stars from 1912 until 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted, so a 1954 flag has exactly this canton. The deeper point is where the flag sits: it is not in a picture, with sky or a pole or a wall around it. It is the picture, edge to edge, with no border and no room left over. That coextensiveness, the flag exactly filling the rectangle, is the whole engine of the work.
2. 2
   The encaustic, a surface of hardened wax

   Everywhere across the colored field; clearest where the red and white stripes catch the light

   The thick, uneven, crusted surface is encaustic: pigment suspended in hot, melted wax. Because the wax cools and sets within seconds of touching the support, each stroke freezes where it lands instead of blending into the next, so the red, white, and blue stay separate and the whole surface builds up into ridges, drips, and lumps. It is the opposite of a flat, machine-printed flag: a national sign rendered in one of the oldest, slowest, most physically handmade techniques in painting.
3. 3
   Newspaper reading through the paint

   Under the stripes and the blue canton, where scraps of printed text show through the wax

   Look into the colored areas and you can make out fragments of newsprint, actual strips of newspaper, dipped in the molten wax and collaged onto the fabric before the encaustic went over them, so the print stays half-visible through the translucent wax. Johns reportedly avoided headlines and political stories, using inconsequential clippings and ads, so the everyday printed word of the culture literally underlies the national symbol without commenting on it.
4. 4
   A handmade hand under an official design

   The contrast between the flag’s rigid geometry and the loose, brushy way every inch of it is worked

   The flag’s design is fixed and official: the stripes are a set width, the stars a set grid, none of it Johns’s to invent. But the way it is painted is anything but rigid, the touch is loose, irregular, openly by hand. That tension, between the regular known pattern and the obviously handmade surface, is the painting’s quiet drama: the most impersonal image imaginable, made by the most personal and laborious means.
5. 5
   Three panels, joined

   The two faint vertical seams where the three separate supports meet

   It is not one continuous sheet. The picture is built on three separate panels mounted on plywood, part of MoMA’s official medium line, not a guess. The flag is fabricated, in sections, the way a real flag is sewn together, which quietly reinforces the question the whole work poses: is this a depiction of a flag, or a constructed object that is itself a kind of flag?
6. 6
   No background, no depth, no scene

   The entire surface, there is nothing behind, around, or in front of the flag

   Nothing recedes. Nothing sits in front of anything else. There is no setting, no horizon, no space for a figure to stand and look at a flag. The flag is frontal, flat, and exactly the size and shape of the thing you are looking at. That refusal of any background is what forces the famous question, is it a flag, or a painting of a flag?, because the image and the object have collapsed into one.