Too risky to buy, then a gift to MoMA

For a few years Flag sat mostly unseen. Then, in January 1958, the dealer Leo Castelli (1907–1999) gave Johns his first solo exhibition, and it made him famous almost at once. The show was a sensation; one of the most influential galleries of the era launched one of the defining careers of the era, and Flagwas at the center of it. (Provenance is the documented chain of who has owned a work, in order, from the artist’s hand to now.)

What happened next is the best story in the painting’s life, and it turns on the flag itself. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1902–1981), the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, saw the Castelli show and wanted Flag for MoMA. But his trustees balked. This was the Cold War, and a committee worried that a painted American flag (a flag, made strange, hung in an art museum) might be read as “unpatriotic,” as if Johns were doing something disrespectful to the national symbol. The very loadedness that made the picture powerful made the museum nervous to own it.

Barr found a way around the problem. He persuaded the architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005) to buy Flag privately, with the understanding that it would come to MoMA later, once the heat had passed. It changed hands twice, Johnson bought it (for a sum reported at the time as around a thousand dollars, the figure attached to Flag in the 1958 Castelli deal) and then gave it to the museum, so MoMA never paid a cent for the painting it had been too cautious to buy. In 1973, as Barr was retiring, Johnson gave the painting to the museum in Barr’s honor, which is precisely what the credit line still records: “Gift of Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.” The painting MoMA had been too cautious to buy in 1958 it received, free, fifteen years later.

Flag was also a beginning for Johns himself. He returned to the motif again and again over the following years (White Flag (1955), Three Flags (1958), and a long line of later flag paintings and prints) but the MoMA picture, the one that came out of the dream, is the first. It hangs in New York today, in copyright and still owned by a living artist, the small wax-and-newspaper flag that walked American painting out of one era and into the next without ever raising its voice.