The Evergrowing Litanies of The Chariot

Jasper Johns, Litanies of The Chariot, 1961, dimensions? funny you should ask I’ve had this tiny Jasper Johns drawing about Duchamp in my tabs for months now, but I guess I’m finally going to post it now because the Wolfgang Tillmans window photo reminded me of to. Litanies of The Chariot is Johns’s first quotation of another artist’s work, sort of: it’s a note/poem/text from Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934), as translated in 1960 by George Heard Hamilton and Richard Hamilton: SLOW LIFEVICIOUS CIRCLE ONANISMHORIZONTALROUND TRIPFOR THE BUFFERJUNK OF LIFETIN CORDSIRON WIRECONCENTRIC WOODENPULLEYSMONOTONOUS FLY WHEELBEER PROFESSOR Johns had a copy of The Green Box by then—he loaned it to the Whitney in 2021—and he even reviewed The Green Book, as the English version is known. But he apparently made this drawing in 1961 at the request of Robert Scull, who gave it to MoMA curator Dorothy C. Miller. The timing of it all makes me wonder if it’s related to the Sculls being retroactively…