False Start

Judged on the parts, as the subtractive test asks, and four of them are required. Without the stencilled names the canvas is a late gestural abstraction of the kind Johns had set himself against. Without the disagreement between name, letter colour and ground there is no argument. Without the all-over spread a centre would rank the names, and without the brushed patches the stencils would have no field to be wrong about. What yields is the unit. In an all-over field the place of a given patch, and of most given words, could change without loss, and the names could be a third thinner or thicker with the work knowing the same thing. It is a method more than a structure in which each part has its station: compelled in its four elements, free in their placing.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Two things are brought into the open, and both hold. The name of a colour and the colour are different orders, and reading and seeing compete in the same instant: no one can take in a name lettered in another colour, on a ground of a third, without a check, and anyone can test it on himself before the canvas. Psychology has measured that interference since Stroop’s experiments of 1935, named here as analogy, not source. Second, the expressive brushstroke is a convention: laid down as a ground and labelled like any other material, the gesture of the decade before is shown to be a sign. Both are meanings, not moods, and the image carries them as fully as words would. What holds the axis short of the gate is breadth: the disclosure is a condition of perception and of painting, close to a demonstration, and it reaches a life beyond that only through the mind’s split between word and sight.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The elevation is real and of one kind: chromatic delight. The field is alive to every edge in hot reds, oranges and yellows broken by blue and white, so dense that at first sight it reads as a single burst. The delight recurs at a lower pitch as the eye moves from name to patch and finds the next contradiction, and from the near view of the strokes to the far view of the whole. What holds the axis is that the work disarms its own height. The colour lifts and the words bring it back to a puzzle; the viewer is set to checking rather than given over, and the irony keeps the brightness at arm’s length. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport by scale, and the brightness is sustained across the field rather than rising to summits.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Little archetype is built. The title brings in a race and a start called back, a beginning that must be taken again, and so the canvas as a false start of painting itself, the gesture begun and recalled; but that reading is the title’s, carried as wit. The act on which the canvas is structured is naming, and naming is an old pattern: the first man giving names to the creatures, the confusion of tongues at Babel. Here the names are given and fail to fit, and that failure is load-bearing. On the canvas it mostly stays a demonstration about signs. Nothing in the painting makes the failure of names carry the weight of a fall; it carries the weight of a perceptual check, and the viewer who brings Babel brings it. Misnaming is half built; the rest is evoked.

Score: 6.9 / 10

The inheritance is twofold. There was Johns’s own work, the flags, targets and numbers of 1954 to 1958, mostly in encaustic, each a flat given sign filling the canvas, cool, and by 1958 the ground of his fame, with The Museum of Modern Art buying from his first show at Leo Castelli’s gallery that year. And there was the gestural abstraction of the New York School, against which that work had been read. The departure takes the opposing side’s means, loose oil, full colour and the all-over brushed field, and turns them into a ground for stencilled labels, so that gesture becomes found material, like a flag. The stake was to set aside the emblem a year after it made him, and to risk reading as a late follower of de Kooning. Held below the gate because stencilled letters had entered painting with Braque and Picasso from about 1911, Magritte had already made the word set against what it names a picture’s subject, and the risk was taken but not paid: the canvas was received at once as a major work.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is a collision of three things in one place: a name, the colour it is lettered in and the colour it lies on. That collision exists only in paint; said in a sentence it is a remark, seen it is a check the eye cannot avoid. The stencil matters: a mechanical, impersonal letter set against the hand’s stroke, so that two kinds of making meet as two kinds of meaning. The all-over format matters: no centre, every name equal, the eye kept moving and never allowed to settle on one verdict. The size lets the field be taken whole and then read word by word, two acts the work sets against each other. Held below the top because part of the form is a method that transfers: the colour-name works that follow run the scheme again, and much of the knowledge survives the transfer.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: sixty-seven years of return, within a large literature on Johns that runs from Leo Steinberg’s essay of 1962 on his first seven years onward. The questions stay open. Is the brushed field parody, homage or appropriation of Abstract Expressionism? Is the work first about perception, about language or about the conventions of painting? How far does it anticipate the language-based art of the late 1960s, and how does the title, a race called back, bear on the image? The painter’s own guarded statements do not settle any of it. Return also yields on the canvas: each viewing finds another name lying on a patch of its own colour, another word cropped by the edge, another letter half buried in strokes. Held below the top because the central conceit is grasped at once, and much of the literature is about the painter’s turn from emblem to colour rather than this canvas alone.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is New York painting at the turn from the 1950s to the 1960s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the gestural field into a field of signs: the brushstroke becomes an object to be named, and the word enters painting not as Cubist fragment or collage but as a label in conflict with what it labels. With Rauschenberg’s combines of the same years, it is one of the hinges from Abstract Expressionism to what followed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Johns’s own work, the turn that leads to the colour names and the grey paintings of the 1960s; beyond it, the cool handling of the sign in Pop and the use of words as the material of a picture in Conceptual art; and the colour-name device, repeated in teaching and in later painting. The discount: most of Johns’s reach belongs to Flag and the targets of 1954 to 1955, and much of this canvas’s fame is its sale of 1988, which marks the market, not the field.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, whole, with no later hand known; the image stands as made, and it has outlived the gestural moment it took as its material, for it is not seen as a period piece. Presence is charged. The canvas has been in private hands throughout, sold at auction in 1988, and seen at intervals on loan and in retrospectives rather than in continuous public view. Its wide fame rests on reproduction and on price, and price is presence, not proof. Even so, presence is reduced, not absent: the image is among the most reproduced American paintings of its decade. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no damage known. Over sixty-seven years the form is whole and the image widely known; private keeping holds the figure a step below what a painting of this age would otherwise carry.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of oil and stencil, read to the same anchors as any medium. The colour is orchestrated across a large field so that no region dominates, the hot hues held in balance by blues and whites. The strokes are of a measured size, laid in a controlled, broken hatching that reads as spontaneous and is not: a hand imitating gesture with exactness, which is itself part of what the work says. The lettering is varied in size, colour and position, cropped at the edges so that the field reads as continuing beyond the frame, and worked into the surface so that word and stroke interlock rather than one sitting on the other. The making is load-bearing: the impersonality of the stencil against the brushed ground is the argument. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, and in parts the field reads as filled rather than placed.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant kinds of element: a name set squarely and legibly against a patch of a contrasting colour, and a name cropped by the edge and nearly lost in strokes of its own hue. One law governs both: a name and a colour put in the same place, each testing the other, with match and mismatch both possible and neither privileged. Every element in the field is that law or its ground; there is no second kind of mark, no figure and no motif outside it. Even the title obeys it, a name given to the painting that does not describe what it shows. The law is total. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one opposition, word against colour, in one register of loose oil, and the range between its farthest elements, though real, is not wide.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The orders held are few, and held in one field. Language, in the names. Perception, in the colours and the eye’s work between them. Consciousness, in the viewer divided between reading and seeing and caught in the act of judging. Art and its history, in the gestural painting of the decade before, taken as material and named. The social world leaves a trace only in the title, a race begun too soon, present as a word. These are integrated, one collision seen four ways. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no body, no family, no labour, no state, no history beyond painting’s own, no natural order and nothing sacred. The figure describes the form.

Score: 6.2 / 10