From now until May 4, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will host Jasper Johns: Gray, an examination of the American artist’s use of that color. At the entrance to the exhibition are two paintings of about equal size, both from 1959. On a recent Saturday, I stood before them, Simon and Garfunkel in my headphones, and thought about America.

FALSE START / JUBILEE 

Of about equal size, the works “False Start” and “Jubilee” serve as an apt introduction to the myriad gray works in the rest of the gallery. “False Start” is all bold color: slashes of red and blue and yellow and orange, something like a child’s sensibility inspiring the splashes of the brightest, warmest colors. Stenciled across the piece are the names of these colors, but written in opposition to their appearance. ORANGE is written in white, WHITE in red, BLUE in yellow.

To the right of “False Start” we’re shown “Jubilee.” While its name seems to better fit the more jubilant piece on the left, “Jubilee” takes the same method of painting and stenciling: slashing blotches of paint, stenciled names of colors. Here, however, the piece is executed solely in black, white and gray. The stenciled names of colors remain the same. ORANGE, BLUE, RED, YELLOW, but seemingly without any color.

Consider, though, how color works: we’re all taught at some point that when all the colors of the spectrum mix, the result is white, not black, as we might expect. So despite the more boldly assertive tones of “False Start,” it is in fact “Jubilee” that contains the most color. The full range of black to white, and gray in between.

GRAY

How then is gray not the most impressive of colors? The perfect balance between white and black, between everything and nothing? Think of gray skies—gray seems so miserable a color because it is by nature so uncertain. Will it rain? Will it storm?

We take comfort in bright and clearly defined colors, the red and yellow and orange we can understand and know perfectly. The clear blue sky. By understanding we seem to have a measure of control. Our world seems to make sense: there are no shades of gray in our understanding.

URBAN

The gray concrete jungle. Is this not also a mix of nothing and everything? In New York City, gray is everywhere, permeates every office building and every sidewalk. The subway trains and pigeons, the Empire State Building and Yankee Stadium. They are battlefields of color, wars between two extremes of a spectrum.

In 1955, Jasper Johns painted perhaps his most famous work, “White Flag.” Its title sums it up: a huge white American flag. I’ve always thought of this piece as making a powerful statement about race. But as I walk past “False Start” and “Jubilee” and enter the gallery, I spot a later, better version: “Two Flags,” of 1959. Two gray flags stacked one above the other. Is this a perfect mixture of white and black, I wonder? Or is this a portrait of American race relations in the late-50’s, black and white battling from the extremes?

“AMERICA”

Ideal America is the melting pot. “Give us your tired, your hungry,” says the Statue of Liberty, and on my headphones I listen to Simon and Garfunkel singing “Let us be lovers we’ll marry our fortunes together.” Can we not hope for that? I walk out of the museum and onto Fifth Avenue, walk past the building where the great American Jackie Kennedy once lived, and I think that a more ideal America exists just within our reach. Rain clouds have gathered overhead. New Yorkers walk quickly in every direction in their black pea coats, while a woman in a puffy white parka speaks German into her cell phone and puffs away at a cigarette.

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If we can only embrace grayness, learn to understand and accept a lack of extreme definition one way or another, we may in fact find the happiness that so often eludes us. The mind itself is made of gray matter. Is this not a start?

(for KB)

by Joseph Riippi