Built in hot wax over newspaper

The first surprise in Flag is its material. It is not “oil on canvas.” MoMA’s own catalogue line reads: encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels. Every part of that is a fact you can see, and the surprising one is the first word.

Encaustic is one of the oldest painting techniques there is: pigment suspended in hot, melted wax. You keep the wax molten on a heat source, mix your color into it, and brush it on while it’s liquid, and here is the crucial part, because it controls everything about how the painting looks: the wax cools and hardens within seconds of touching the surface. So each stroke freezes where it lands. It does not flow into the next stroke, it does not blend, it does not smooth out. The red sets before it can run into the white. The result is a surface that builds up thick and uneven, full of drips, ridges, and crusts of pigmented wax. Where a normal oil painting wants to look seamless, an encaustic painting keeps the record of every separate touch.

Now the rest of the recipe, which is just as physical. Johns started not with a fresh canvas but with fabric (widely described as a cut bedsheet) which he mounted on plywood and penciled the flag’s outline onto. Then, before the color, he laid down collage: strips of ordinary newspaper, dipped in the molten wax and pressed onto the fabric. Only then did the encaustic go over the top. Because the wax stays slightly translucent, the newsprint never fully disappears; you can still read scraps of printed words and ads through the red, white, and blue. He reportedly used inconsequential clippings, steering clear of headlines and political stories, so the literal stuff underneath the national symbol is just the throwaway printed paper of an ordinary day.

And it was built in three separate panels, mounted side by side on the plywood, not one continuous sheet. That is in MoMA’s medium line, and it is part of the point: the flag is fabricated, assembled in sections, the way a real flag is sewn together rather than painted in one go. So the picture is constructed at every level, bedsheet, newsprint, wax, three joined panels. It is less a painting of a flag than a flag made, by hand, out of the slowest materials available. (The canvas is dated 1954 on the back; MoMA dates the finished work 1954–55, which is why you see both years.)