A known sign as the whole subject

To feel why this small flag mattered so much, you have to know what filled the New York galleries when Johns made it. The reigning style was Abstract Expressionism: huge, non-representational canvases by painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, meant to register the artist’s inner state and the very act of painting, Pollock’s poured skeins, de Kooning’s slashing strokes, Rothko’s floating fields of color. The whole program pointed inward, toward private feeling and the drama of the gesture, and away from any recognizable subject. A painting was supposed to be a window onto the artist’s soul, and emphatically not a picture of an ordinary thing.

Johns broke with all of that in the calmest way imaginable: he made the entire subject a common, flat, already-known sign. Not his inner state, the U.S. flag, a design he didn’t invent, rendered at full size, frontal, edge to edge. There was nothing to compose; the flag’s arrangement is given. There was no expressive scene, no feeling to externalize, no background to fall away into. And so something strange and specific happens that does not happen in an Abstract Expressionist canvas: the depiction and the object collapse into one rectangle. A Rothko is unmistakably a painting of nothing in particular; Johns’s Flag is so flat, so frontal, and so exactly coextensive with its own image that you genuinely cannot say whether you are looking at a painting of a flag or simply a flag. The picture is its image. That collapse is the break.

And the tone of it was the other half of the shock. Where Abstract Expressionism was hot, anguished, and personal, Johns’s touch with this loaded national symbol was cool, detached, deadpan, he simply set the flag down and let it be a flag, refusing to tell you whether it meant patriotism, irony, or nothing at all. (That detachment is real, even though, paradoxically, the wax surface is one of the most intensely hand-worked in modern painting. The handling is laborious; the attitude is impassive. Both at once.)

By treating a flat, mass-culture sign as a perfectly good thing to paint, Flag opened a door. Within a few years Pop Art walked through it, Andy Warhol with his soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein with his blown-up comic panels, taking images straight from the culture with the same deadpan. And the work’s flatness, literalness, and seriality fed forward into Minimalism and Conceptual art as well. It is routinely named one of the hinge pictures of postwar art.

There is one thing to place correctly. Johns is not, strictly, a Pop artist. Art historians usually file him under Neo-Dada, or call him proto-Pop, a forerunner rather than a card-carrying member like Warhol or Lichtenstein. Flag (1954–55) actually predates Pop’s arrival by several years; it is one of the things that made Pop possible. So the right way to place this picture is as a bridge: it leads out of Abstract Expressionism and toward Pop, standing in the doorway between them. Not the first Pop painting, but the one that cleared the ground.