A flag that is also a painting of a flag

Stand in front of it. The picture is modest in size for how famous it is, about three and a half feet tall by five feet wide, a wide landscape rectangle. And here is what the famous image never gets: its stars. Count them, there are forty-eight, not fifty. A modern eye half-registers that as a mistake. It isn’t. The United States flag carried forty-eight stars from 1912 until 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states. Johns painted this in 1954–55, so a forty-eight-star canton is exactly, historically correct. The flag is right. It is your memory of today’s flag that is wrong, and that little jolt (looking hard at the thing you were sure you knew) is the whole experience Johns was after.

Notice next where the flag sits, which is everywhere. The blue field is up in the top-left corner, where it always is, but the flag is not hung inside a picture. There is no sky, no pole, no wall, no shadow, no room around it. The flag runs clean to all four edges and fills the rectangle exactly. The thing depicted and the object you are looking at are the same size and the same shape. There is no background at all. Nothing recedes; nothing stands in front of anything. That absence is not an oversight; it is the entire move.

Now look into the surface rather than at the image, and a second painting appears under the first. The colored field is thick, lumpy, and crusted, ridges and drips of pigmented wax, each stroke frozen in place by the cooling encaustic. And down inside it, under the stripes and the canton, you can read scraps of newspaper: actual printed text, collaged on and left half-visible through the translucent wax. The everyday word-fabric of the city, literally underneath the national symbol.

Hold those two things together, because their friction is the painting. The flag’s design is rigid, official, and impersonal, a fixed grid of stars, a set count of stripes, none of it Johns’s to invent or arrange. But the handling is the opposite: loose, brushy, openly worked by hand, every touch left showing. The most impersonal image in American life, made by the most personal and laborious possible means. And the seams of the three joined panels are faintly there too, the reminder that this flag was assembled in pieces, like a real one. The regular known pattern pulling one way, the irregular human surface pulling the other, that tension is the engine of the whole picture.