Artists At Work

The bigger folly than trying to understand what an artist is doing is trying to understand what an artist is doing now. It’s a fool’s game, and apparently, I am here for it. When I started looking at the stick figures motif in Jasper Johns’s work in 2024, and into 2025, it was driven by the busy little guys’ appearance in a series of prints that were shown in 2024, and 2023, but which were based on drawings from 2019, which were shown in 2021. Which may have been peak little guys. Point is, it can be easier to focus on the origin of a Johns motif than on the complex way it gets used, especially when there’s a time lag and incomplete picture of what the artist is up to, and especially when he is still using it. In the last couple of months, the Johns has added three stick figures prints to the Walker Art Center’s Every Johns Print Collection. The two untitled works on the outside—the 2019 figures in front of Margaret Geller’s “Slice of the Universe” diagram, and the 2021 figures…

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