The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jasper Johns · encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, in three panels, 107.3 by 153.8 cm · one object: the single painting as it stands, the later flags weighed only as context · the flag of the United States with forty-eight stars, its design run to every edge of the support, printed scraps under the wax · 1954 to 1955 · The Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 1973 · nothing lost, nothing replaced, nothing added by another hand
Mode
A given emblem made a painting; a flat sign coextensive with its support, painted by hand
Mythos
The banner of the tribe, the cloth for which people die, held at arm’s length as a sign
Phase
Begun in 1954 and dated 1954 to 1955; the first of the painter’s flags, shown in New York in 1958
Presentation
Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels, 107.3 by 153.8 cm; thirteen stripes and forty-eight stars to every edge
Register
Cool and intimate; beauty at the near view, in wax that holds light and print that surfaces through it
Scale
A metre and a half wide, hung at the height of a body; one emblem and the day’s news beneath it
Governing Proposition
The flag of the United States, as it stood with forty-eight stars, is painted in wax over scraps of newsprint and run to every edge of its support, with no ground and no margin around it. The wager of the painting is that a thing seen every day can be made visible by being made by hand, that a picture can coincide with what it pictures until the question of which it is has no stable answer, and that an image chosen because it needed no invention leaves the painter free on every other level.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Flag is dated 1954 to 1955. It is encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, in three panels, 107.3 by 153.8 centimetres, and it hangs in The Museum of Modern Art in New York, given by Philip Johnson in 1973 in honour of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. What it shows is the flag of the United States as it stood from 1912 to 1959: thirteen horizontal stripes, red and white, and a blue canton at the upper left carrying forty-eight white stars in six rows of eight.
The design fills the support to every edge. There is no ground, no margin and no space around it; where the flag stops, the painting stops. Each stripe is a little over eight centimetres high, and the canton runs seven stripes deep. Nothing in the design was invented, and nothing in it could be taken away without its ceasing to be the flag.
Yet it is not a facsimile. The flag fixed by the executive order of 1912 is almost twice as long as it is high; this one is about 1.43 times as long as it is high, some three quarters the length of a regulation flag of its height. The design was fitted to a rectangle of the painter’s choosing and then made to fill it. The edge of the image is the edge of the thing, and the question the object puts at first sight, whether it is a flag or a painting of one, starts there.
Movement II
Jasper Johns was in his mid-twenties, unknown, and had destroyed his earlier work. He has said in interviews that the subject came to him in a dream, in which he painted a large American flag. The painting that followed took a subject that required no invention and a design that composed itself, and spent its invention elsewhere: on the support, the edge and the skin.
New York painting in 1954 stood at the height of its authority. The gesture was the trace of a self, the field carried no given image, and the sublime was the painter’s claim. Against that, Johns chose a figure that was already flat and so could not sit on a ground, and a painting that would be cool where those were heated. He spoke of the flag and the target as “things the mind already knows”. Because the image was given, every other level of the painting was left free.
Each part had a precedent. Duchamp had set a manufactured object forward as art; Peto and Harnett had painted flat things so that the painting and the thing nearly met; Stuart Davis had painted emblems. None had set a given flat sign coextensive with its support and called it a painting. The risk was plain. In the McCarthy years the object could be read as a joke, a provocation or a slight to the flag.
Movement III
The surface is wax. Encaustic, pigment in hot wax, sets as it cools, so each stroke stays where it was laid, separate and visible, neither blended into the next nor smoothed away. The stripes are held to their edges while the strokes within them run, drip and overlap; each star is cleanly bounded and brushed as a small event of its own, a boss of white wax. The hand is everywhere, and it is impersonal: a record of handling, not the revelation of a self.
Under the wax is collage: newsprint, comics and other printed scraps laid on the fabric. Through the white stripes they surface like things seen under ice, legible in pieces and never whole; in the reds and the blue they are drowned. The day’s news is sealed into the emblem, and the depth of the wax holds it there. Which items they are, and from which days, is not given here.
The wax holds light in its depth. Three colours become a field of many: no red is one red, no white is blank. Seen near, the surface is a delight that recurs wherever the eye settles; seen first from across a room, it gives the small shock of the emblem appearing where a painting should be. Made smooth, the object would be a flag. It is the wax, its strokes and the print beneath that keep it both at once.
Movement IV
Put a margin round the design and it becomes a picture of a flag, and the question closes. Paint it in flat, smooth oil and it becomes a flag made of paint, and the question closes the other way. Run to every edge, in wax over print, it is both, and it will not decide. The refusal is not a riddle with an answer. It is what the painting shows about signs: that a picture and the thing it pictures can coincide.
One law governs everything in it. The sharpest star and the most drowned scrap of comic strip are both the flag, made of wax over print, and every mark both builds the design and records the hand. There is no passage of free painting outside the design and no image that is not the emblem. The territory is narrow, one design, three colours, one support, one technique, and within it the painting holds the state, in its own sign; history, in the stars of a half-century and the scraps of a year; the act of seeing; and the labour of the hand. No person is in it, and no story.
The emblem is drained of heat. The banner carried before a people, the cloth for which people die, is made here of board and wax, its stars bosses and its colours slowed. It is neither saluted nor mocked. How far the painting speaks to the politics of the flag in 1954, rather than having them read into it, is still argued. What it plainly does is make a thing seen every day into a thing looked at, stroke by stroke.
Movement V
In 1958 the flags, targets and numbers were shown at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York, and the painting has been in view since. In 1958 and 1959 Frank Stella’s black paintings took from the flags the stripe and the deductive relation of image to edge, and through them a line runs to Minimalism and the shaped canvas. Pop took the given image and the commonplace sign, in Warhol, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg; Conceptual art took the question of what an object is. The move is shared with the targets, the numbers and Rauschenberg’s combines of those years. This is the first of the flags, and the one that made it.
The writing on it has not exhausted it. Leo Steinberg’s essay on Johns of 1962 and his “Other Criteria” of 1972 read it as the sign of a new picture plane, a surface for information rather than a window or a field. Later writing reads it through Duchamp and Cage, through the closeted New York of Johns and Rauschenberg, through the Cold War, through the newsprint as a buried diary, and through semiotics. Each decade’s politics of the flag changes how it reads, and the first question, flag or painting, has not been answered.
Encaustic is among the most stable of paint media, and it holds the newsprint in wax; the support, fabric on plywood, is a composite whose long behaviour is not yet shown. The form is whole, and nothing has been lost, replaced or added. The flag of forty-eight stars was retired in 1959. The painting shows one that no longer flies, and has outlived the form of its own subject.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test returns an odd answer, and the oddity is the work. Nothing in the design can be removed, because nothing in the design was chosen: take away a stripe or a row of stars and it is no longer the flag, and the work requires that it be the flag exactly. The painter’s choices lie in the support, the edges and the skin, and these too are required. Set the image within a margin and it becomes a picture of a flag; make the surface smooth and it becomes a flag. Where it gives is the skin: any other newspaper would serve under the wax, and the stroke is local and interchangeable, a texture rather than a sequence of necessary acts. Compelled as a whole, permitted in its parts.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What the painting brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. A thing seen every day is not seen; made into a painting, slowed and attended to stroke by stroke, the flag becomes visible. A picture and the thing it pictures can coincide, so that the old question of what a painting represents has no stable answer: flag, or painting of a flag? The object will not decide, and the refusal is a disclosure about signs, not a puzzle. A third, quieter: the national emblem, laid over the day’s newsprint in 1954, is handled with a craftsman’s cool, close attention, neither saluted nor mocked. How far that political reading belongs to the object rather than to its readers is unsettled. The two firmer disclosures concern signs and seeing, and they carry the axis short of the gate.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is not the work’s register, and it would be inflation to find it there. The object is a metre and a half wide, hung at the height of a body, cool in temper, without grandeur, terror or transport, and set against the sublime that New York painting was claiming in those years. What it has is beauty at the near view: the wax holds light in its depth, the reds are not one red, each star is a small brushed event, and print and comic strips surface through the white stripes like things seen under ice. That delight recurs wherever the eye settles, and there is the small shock of first recognition, the emblem where a painting should be. Frequency is high and height is low: no passage rises far, and none is meant to.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The flag is the nearest thing a modern republic has to a totem: the banner carried before the tribe, the cloth for which people die. Here that archetype is not alluded to; the whole structure is the emblem itself, load-bearing from edge to edge. But the painting holds it at arm’s length rather than deepening it. The banner is drained of heat, its stars made into wax bosses, its cloth replaced by board; what is treated is the emblem as a sign, not as a sacred thing. The particular does acquire significance: this forty-eight-star flag, these scraps of newsprint, the nation as a surface laid over its daily news. What holds the axis below the gate is that the deep pattern is present by quotation of the whole design, not reconstructed: the subject is the emblem’s meaning, not the myth the emblem carries.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance in 1954 was New York painting at the height of its authority: the gesture as the trace of a self, the field without a given image, the sublime as the painter’s claim. Johns turned from it as completely as a painter could while keeping its paint: a subject that needed no invention, a design that composed itself, a figure already flat and so unable to sit on a ground, and encaustic, which kept the gesture but made it a skin instead of a revelation. Each part had a precedent, in Duchamp’s readymade, the trompe l’oeil of Peto and Harnett and Stuart Davis’s emblems, but none had set a given flat sign coextensive with its support and called it a painting. The stake was real: Johns was in his mid-twenties and unknown, had destroyed his earlier work, and risked being read as a joke, a provocation or a slight to the flag.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Would another form change what the work knows? Entirely. The design runs to every edge, so that the image’s boundary is the object’s boundary: that is the knowledge, the end of the gap between picture and thing. Put a margin round it and it becomes a picture of a flag, and the question closes; paint it smoothly in flat oil and it becomes a flag made of paint, and the question closes the other way. Encaustic keeps each stroke separate and fixed, a record of handling and a field of light at once, and the collage beneath holds the news of a particular year inside the emblem. The proportion, about 1.43 to 1 against the regulation 1.9, shows the design fitted to a painting’s rectangle, not the reverse. Held below the top because the scale is one the form permits rather than compels.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: seventy years of return, and the object is not exhausted. Read in Greenberg’s terms, it is the logical end of flatness; Leo Steinberg, in his essay on Johns of 1962 and in “Other Criteria” of 1972, read it as the sign of a new picture plane, a surface for information rather than a window or a field. Later writing reads it through Duchamp and Cage, through the closeted New York of Johns and Rauschenberg, through the Cold War and the uses of the emblem, through the newsprint under the wax as a buried diary, and through semiotics as a demonstration of sign and referent. The first question, flag or painting, has not been answered. Held below the top because that formal question, once stated, is stated, and much of the return is to the sign rather than to discoveries in the surface.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the painting reorganised what a painting could be, a given image rather than an invented one, the sign as subject, a picture coextensive with its support, the hand present but impersonal; it closed the authority of the gesture in New York as surely as any single canvas could. The discount: the reach belongs to the flags, targets and numbers together, shown at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1958, and is shared with Rauschenberg’s combines of the same years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Stella’s black paintings of 1958 to 1959 took from the flags the stripe and the deductive relation of image to edge, and through Stella the line runs to Minimalism and the shaped canvas; Pop took the given image and the commonplace sign, in Warhol, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg; Conceptual art took the question of what an object is.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival of what makes the work, the image, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole and legible, nothing lost. The forty-eight stars, which might have dated it, have become part of what it shows, a flag of a particular time, and the painting has outlived the conditions that produced it, the authority of Abstract Expressionism and the politics of 1954. Presence: continuous since 1958, in The Museum of Modern Art since 1973, among the most reproduced American paintings. Fabric: encaustic is among the most stable of paint media and fixes the newsprint in wax; but newsprint is acidic, fabric on plywood is a composite support, wax is vulnerable to heat and handling, and the long behaviour of that composite is not yet shown. Over seventy-one years the form is whole and the presence wide; the untested composite holds the figure a step below the widest.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of encaustic and collage at this scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The handling is exact where it must be and free where it can be: each star cleanly bounded and brushed as its own event, the stripes held to their edges while the strokes within them run, drip and overlap, the wax built up so that the newsprint shows through the whites and is drowned in the reds and the blue. Three colours are made to read as a field of many: no red is flat, no white is blank. The making is load-bearing, since without this surface the object is a flag. What holds it short of the highest command: the range is deliberately narrow, one design, three colours and one kind of stroke, and the drawing is given.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a star, brushed in white wax as a bounded shape, and a scrap of comic strip floating under a white stripe. They obey one law: everything is the flag, made of wax over print, and every mark both builds the design and records the hand. There is no second rule, no passage of free painting outside the design, no image that is not the emblem, no ornament. The newsprint is not a second law but the ground of the first, and it never breaks the surface into a separate picture. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is narrow: one given design, three colours, one support, one technique. The range within it, from the sharp edge of a star to the drowned print, is real and small, and the law, which governs it completely, is held for the size of the territory.
Score: 8.6 / 10
A single emblem holds few orders, and the figure describes the form. What it holds: the state, in its own sign, which is the work’s whole image; history, in the forty-eight stars of a particular half-century and the day’s news sealed under the wax; perception, since the object is about how a known thing is seen; and labour, in the hand’s slow building of the surface. These are integrated: the nation and its news, the sign and its seeing, are one surface. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is most of the scale: no person, no family, no body, no landscape, no sacred, no story. The nation is present only as its emblem, and the history only as fragments that cannot be read whole.
Score: 6.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.2, then The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.1. A turn from the gesture to a given flat sign made by hand, risked by an unknown painter on a subject that could be read as a slight to the flag; a form in which the image’s edge is the object’s edge, so that the question of picture or thing cannot close; the first of the flags, from which the stripe, the given image and the question of the object ran on to Stella, Pop and Conceptual art; and an image whole after seventy-one years, its forty-eight stars become part of what it shows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.7: the state in its sign, history in fragments, the act of seeing and the labour of the hand are held as one surface; the person, the family, the body, landscape, the sacred and story are absent, and the figure describes the form. Below the rest, The Sublime at 7.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8: the painting is cool by design and rises only at the near view, and it holds the banner of the tribe at arm’s length, as a sign quoted whole rather than a myth rebuilt.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1 and The Imperishable at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls short by two tenths and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 by seven. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.2, three tenths below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.7. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 101.1, an average of 8.425 that displays as 8.4, in the band of Tier IV and short of the 9.0 the summit also requires; the placement is settled on the aggregate, the gate and the minimum alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the object as it hangs at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2026 (encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, in three panels, 107.3 by 153.8 cm, dated 1954 to 1955, given by Philip Johnson in 1973 in honour of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.), of how it was made and of its later history. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is one object, the single painting, as it stands: nothing in it has been lost or replaced, and no later hand has added to it. The later flags (the white flag of 1955, Three Flags of 1958, the flags in other colours, on targets, in drawings and in prints), the targets and numbers of the same years and the painter’s career are context, and bear on the work only as reach. The proportion is measured from the stated dimensions against the regulation flag of 1912. The painter’s words are quoted once, in the phrase “things the mind already knows”, which is documented; his account of the dream is paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the month the painting was finished, how the three panels divide the design, the order in which the materials were laid, the identity and dates of the printed scraps under the wax, whether the panel joins carry any meaning, the museum’s dealings with the painting before 1973, and its condition.