"a sacrifice upon the altar of those faculties which he sincerely believes to be nobler and more important"
"Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cezanne. And Picasso once said that what matters most to us in Cezanne, more than his pictures, is his anxiety. It seems to me a frmction of modem art to transmit this anxie"
"The heavy outlines that accost these figured nymphs prevent any materialization of bulk or density. They seem to drain energy away from the core of the figure, making it radiate into the space about them. Or perhaps it is our vision that is shunted away, so that a figure is no sooner recognized than"
"Contemporary art is constantly inviting us to applaud the destruction of values which we still cherish, while the positive cause, for the sake of which the sacrifices are made, is rarely made clear."
"But here, in this picture by Jasper Johns, one felt the end of illusion. No more manipulation of paint as a medium of transformation. This man, if he wants something three-dimen- sional, resorts to a plaster cast and builds a box to contain it. When he paints on a canvas, he can only paint what is f"
"With mindless inhumanity or indifference, the organic and the inorganic had been leveled. A dismembered face, multi- plied, blinded, repeats four times above the impersonal stare of a bull's-eye. Bull's-eye and blind faces-but juxtaposed as if by habit or accident, without any expressive intent. As "
"He regains that perpetual oscillation which characterised our looking at pre-abstract art. But whereas, in traditional art, the oscillation was between the painted surface and subject in depth, Johns succeeds in making the pendulum swing within the flatland of post-Abstract Expressionist art. Yet th"
"Johns gives his two-dimensional signs greater substance, weight and texture than they had in reality; in other words, he turns them into objects. The means and the meaning, the visible and the known, are so much on eand the same, that a distinction between content and form is either not yet or no lo"