The painting that began in a dream

In 1954, a young painter named Jasper Johns (born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, and raised in South Carolina) was living in lower Manhattan, in a loft on Pearl Street, a few doors from another young artist, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), who lived nearby on Fulton Street and would become his closest companion and partner for the next years. The two were in and out of each other’s studios, working their way past the reigning style in parallel; what Johns did was not a lone-genius flash but a move he and Rauschenberg were pushing toward together. Johns was twenty-four, mostly unknown, and supporting himself with odd jobs. And around this time he did something drastic: he destroyed essentially every piece of art he then owned, clearing the decks so he could start over and find out what kind of painter he actually wanted to be.

What he started over with was a small set of ready-made, public images he didn’t have to invent: flags, targets, numbers, letters, maps. He had a phrase for the kind of thing he was after, images that are “things the mind already knows.” The idea is that some pictures are so common, so completely fixed in everyone’s head, that you stop actually looking at them: a target, a row of numerals, the Stars and Stripes. They are seen constantly and examined never. The instinct was close to Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, the ordinary, already-made object the artist simply chooses rather than fashions; Johns took an image he hadn’t composed and made it the whole subject of a painting, so that you would be forced to look hard at the thing you thought you already knew.

And the first of those signs, the one that started it, came to him (by his own account) in a dream. Johns has told the story many times, and the wording everyone now repeats, the version enshrined in MoMA’s own text for the painting, goes like this:

One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.

It is genuinely his own account, not a critic’s invention, though the wording has shifted across his retellings over the years. What it tells you is plain enough: he did not labor toward the flag as a clever idea. The most loaded public image in America simply showed up, ready-made, in his sleep, and he went out the next morning and bought what he needed to build it.