Ale Cans

Jasper Johns is a seminal figure in the Pop art movement and in the history of twentieth-century art. His work represents an important stylistic and intellectual link between the emotion and philosophical aspirations of Abstract Expressionism, the heroic style championed in the years during and following World War II, and the cooler, more straightforward aesthetic of the 1960s. Employing an ironic gestural mark, Johns created iconic images of ordinary things that challenge grand notions of high art and question the relationship between an object and its representation. His paintings of targets, flags, and light bulbs suggest that art is simply a part of life, even a commodity for consumption. When he began printmaking in 1960, Johns frequently recycled images from his paintings and sculptures. Ale Cans, a lithograph from the Leo Steinberg Collection, is derived from Johns’s landmark 1960 sculpture Painted Bronze, whose subject is two cans of Ballantine Ale. Historians consider Ale Cans one of Johns’s most important prints because it incorporates his newly refined skill at lithography with one of his most significant images. Leo Steinberg acquired Ale Cans directly from the artist and used its image to illustrate the cover of the reprint of his groundbreaking 1963 study of Johns’s work.