The title of the Jasper Johns’ retrospective at the Met is ‘Gray’, as it collects work from his career that exemplifies his preoccupation with the color, or non-color, gray. The more recent work, dated 2007, and not shown before, is the some of the strongest. Also on view is a work that incorporates the imagery from a Henri Monnier painting, one of the most recent addition to Johns’ iconography.

Jasper Johns: Gray is on view through May 4, 2008 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street

Photo of ‘Beckett’ by Jamie M. Stukenberg.

A quaint art history lesson: An illicit painting by Henri Monnier, a French cartoonist (in the sense of Daumier) from the 19th century, shows a teenage boy peering out from behind a standing screen on a couple, man and woman, having sex. We can only see the back of the boy, the screen, and the legs of the copulating couple. His shadow against the screen reveals that he is masturbating. There are then three separate spaces in the work, at least two of which have erotic happenings: the couple’s, the boy’s, and ours. The boy sees the couple having sex, and we see the boy masturbating, therefore both we, the viewer, and the boy are voyeurs.

The picture described above is the subject of one of Jasper Johns drawings in his present show, a collection of drawings from the last decade at Matthew Marks Gallery. In Johns’ drawing, he flips the image like a mirror would, so the boy is on the left not the right, while also reducing the image, removing color and washing it in a single grey. A black outline illustrates the source image. Johns’ whole drawing becomes a single reflection of the original image. This is conceptually tantalizing because of how, in the original work, the boy’s shadow conveys the content of the work instead of the three figures. Johns, as any viewer of Monnier’s piece, can only comprehend it through its inversion, its casting, its shade.

The boy’s voyeurism could be a bleak portrayal of the artist; in Monnier’s and now Johns’ work the artist, as the boy, is insulated, alone, self-pleasuring. Yes, we can feel the ennui. I doubt though, that at this point in our history, any artist could assume that all-seeing position the boy revels in. Perhaps Mr. Johns could have, decades ago.

“Jasper Johns Drawings 1997-2007″ on display through April 12th at Matthew Marks Gallery. 522 West 22nd Street.

“Untitled” and “Flags” by Jasper Johns (not the images in question).