Map

Judged on the layers the canvas is made of, then on its passages. The given line cannot go: without the borders there is no map and no nation, only a field of primaries, and the wager is that a schoolroom diagram can bear the full weight of painting. The stencilled names cannot go: they are the second given, words as things, and without them the shapes of the states lose the labels by which anyone knows them. The paint cannot go, or the canvas is an enlarged printed outline. What yields is the passage: within a state a red could be a blue, a drip could fall elsewhere, a name could be buried or left clear, and the canvas would know the same thing. The scale is chosen, not compelled. Necessity holds in the design and loosens in the surface.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Credited through image as fully as through words, and what the canvas shows can be stated. The nation as most people know it is a diagram learned in school, borders and names, and here that knowledge appears as a convention laid over a ground that does not respect it: the paint crosses the lines the stencils name. The expressive brushstroke of the decade before is a convention too, as given as a map, since it is set here to colour in a schoolroom outline. And seeing and knowing part company before a thing the mind already knows: a name is read and the looking stops. These are meanings, not moods. Held below the gate because the second and third were first disclosed in the flags and targets, and are restated here on a new sign at a larger size.

Score: 8.0 / 10

There is elevation of one kind, and it is not often high. It is energy: a continent set moving by paint, the borders dissolving and reforming as the eye crosses the canvas, the primaries at full strength at a scale that fills the field of view. The strongest moment is the first sight from across the room, when the whole country is one turbulent surface; some have read a weather in it, storms crossing the states. What holds the axis down is the register. The irony is cool, the source is a school diagram, and the picture refuses grandeur even as it borrows the scale and gesture of a painting that had sought the sublime. There is no terror and little transport: one summit, the whole seen at once, and a level plain of pleasure in the detail.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The archetypes are present and largely evoked. The land and its naming: a continent made a country by writing names on it, the old pattern of possession by naming, made literal by letters laid on territory. America as an image of itself: the classroom map every citizen carries, as the flag is the emblem every citizen salutes. Some of this is built, since the canvas is made from exactly the two acts that make a nation’s image, drawing a line and writing a name, and from the turbulence that unmakes both. But the particular stays particular: this map, this decade’s painting, this joke on the classroom. It does not become an image of the earth, of origin or of a people’s story, and the myth of the nation arrives with the viewer rather than being raised by the work.

Score: 7.3 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the gestural painting of New York in the 1950s, its drips and dragged strokes at full scale; and Johns’s own departure from it in the flags and targets, where a flat given sign coincides with the flat canvas. The turn here is real. The sign is now a whole territory of compartments and words, not one emblem; the medium turns from slow encaustic to fast oil; and the brushwork is let loose, wetter and freer than anywhere in the sign paintings, so that the gesture he had been held to oppose comes back in full and is set to colour in an outline. It was taken at a cost to how his position was read. But the decisive wager, a given flat sign as the whole of a painting, was placed in 1954 to 1955; this is a large new move on a path already proved.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. The map is already flat, so the canvas does not picture it: it is a map, painted, as the flag paintings are flags. Paint a picture of a map instead, a sheet lying on a table in space, and the coincidence of sign and support is gone, and with it the claim that the painting and the given thing are one object. The free brushwork against the fixed borders is itself the knowledge: in a form where the lines held, nothing would show how thin the convention is. The stencils are the knowledge too, printed capitals made by hand, the given lettering of the shop and the school. Held below the top because much of what the form knows was known by the form of the flags, and because the size serves the work without being required by it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over promise: sixty-five years of return, in one of the most visited collections in the world and in a large literature on Johns. The questions stay open. Is the painting about America or about painting, and is that a difference? Is the returning gesture homage to Abstract Expressionism, parody of it, or its exhaustion? Does the canvas close the sign paintings or open the next phase, the canvases of objects, words and greys? How are the given and the made to be told apart in a surface where the names are sometimes the only drawing? It yields at two distances, the map from the room and the paint up close. Held below the top because most of these questions are asked of the sign paintings as a group, and this canvas is seldom their first instance.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Field: American painting around 1960, at the turn from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and the art of the sign. Intrinsic force: the given-sign method enlarged from an emblem to a territory full of words, and the gesture of the previous generation absorbed into it rather than refused, a move that showed the two could be held in one canvas. The discount is large: the reorganisation that moved the field, the given flat sign, belongs to the flags of the mid-1950s, and much of this canvas’s reach is the reach of that earlier move carried on. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the map became a type in later art, though how far any later map descends from this canvas is not shown; and its pairing of stencilled word and painted field runs on into the word paintings of the decade that followed.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, whole after sixty-five years; no cut, loss, replacement or later intervention is known. Presence: in The Museum of Modern Art, widely shown and reproduced, and steady in accounts of postwar American painting; wide, but not the widest, for the painter’s flags stand ahead of it in fame. Fabric: oil on canvas, thick in places and dripped; no condition problem is known, and none is charged beyond the general risk of the medium. The surface is tied to its moment in one respect only, the political map of 1961, which has not changed, and the schoolroom outline it borrows has not dated. The figure sits near the top of what its span allows and is held a step below the widest for presence.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged as command of oil on canvas at wall scale, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The border is kept and lost by the brush, drawn as an edge in one passage and erased by a crossing stroke in the next, so that the map is always legible from the room and never secure up close. The three primaries, with white and grey, are managed across the whole width so that no region dominates. The stencilled names are set into the paint at varied pressure, some crisp, some dragged through wet colour, some overpainted, and where they fall reads as found rather than designed. The costs: the gestural vocabulary is borrowed by design and narrow by the painter’s own standard, some passages read as filled rather than worked, and the encaustic of the flags shows a finer hand.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: a stencilled abbreviation set crisply in a small eastern state, and a wide passage of loose colour across the West, where the borders are long straight lines and the paint crosses them freely. They obey one law: a given schematic sign, its lines and its names, laid flat to the edges of the canvas, and a painted field that neither illustrates it nor ignores it, but colours it in and runs over it. Every element is that law at some scale; there is no depicted space, no second subject, no mark that is neither given nor gesture. The range is wider than in the single emblems before it: many compartments, many words, small states and large, coast and inland border. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is still one sign and one manner of painting it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The orders held are five, and four of them are integrated. The state, as a political schema of borders and names, not as power or people. The land, as the natural order seen only through its coast and outline. Language, as names that are also shapes. Consciousness, in the gap between what the viewer knows and what the viewer sees, which is the work’s real medium. And the history of painting, in the borrowed gesture. These are held in one structure, the given sign and the paint that covers it. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no history of the country the map shows, and nothing sacred. The figure describes the form, a single sign that holds a territory and not the lives within it.

Score: 6.6 / 10