Jasper Johns Follow Your Dreams

wait, you said you saw it in a dream? Jasper Johns, 24, with Flag and saw, the lean-in variation, 1955, photographed by Robert Rauschenberg, who had a combine upstairs called Rebus, via RRF What if I’ve been wrong all along about the origin story of Jasper Johns’s Flag? The first flag painting I did came in the Fifties when I was trying to become a painter, and I had been working in various…styles, I guess. Nothing seeming to mean much to me, except that one made a picture, there it was. And I one night dreamed that I had painted a flag of the United States of America and I got up the next morning and went out and bought materials and began to paint this flag. That’s the longest version of the story I think I’ve seen, from a 1966 TV interview with curator Alan Solomon. When I put parts of the interview transcript online in 2011, I was skeptical of the dream story. Not that I didn’t believe it, or thought Johns wasn’t telling the truth, but that it seemed like he hinted at other…