The swoopy curves, pointy wings, and titanium sheen of Frank Gehry’s galactic Guggenheim Museum Bilbao make the perfect hangar for “Jasper Johns: Night Driver.” The retrospective, which opened yesterday, spans decades and includes hundreds of paintings, sculptures, drawings, stage designs, and assemblages from an American artist of Picasso-esque output.
Ninety-six years old and still creatively active at his estate in Sharon, Connecticut, Johns is the last great living survivor of the postwar generation that produced Robert Rauschenberg (a collaborator and romantic partner), Andy Warhol, John Cage, Ruth Asawa, Merce Cunningham, Frank O’Hara, and others who dwell with the gods. Like them, he undercut the macho ethos of Abstract Expressionism and the artist as rebel—personified by a drunken Jackson Pollock publicly urinating in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace at a party. Johns played it cool and methodical, refusing to break a sweat.
