Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, in an environment far removed from art and culture. He joined the University of South Carolina and studied there briefly until 1948. Later in New York, Jasper Johns worked in the field of advertising drawing. He met young artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, before serving two years in the US Army during the Korean War. He is one of the founding artists of American pop art, and even more of neo-Dadaism. Famous for his series devoted to American flags and targets, he also reinterprets the universe of everyday life, bringing reality and banality into art in an often radical, sometimes minimalist way. Enigmatic, perhaps ironic, his works embody the creative explosion of the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s-1970s.

Born of "abstract expressionism," American painter and cartoonist Jasper Johns took objects in 1955 to "do something else with." It features flags and targets, geometric and symbolic objects, and confuses image and support (Flag, 1955). In 1959, he added letters and figures to his paintings, contrasting the two meanings - writing, painting. In the sixties, he was one of the initiators of pop art. He painted very carefully, in order to reproduce perfectly the model, bronze mouldings and carvings of everyday objects. He fixes utensils on his canvases and composes autobiographical still lifes.
"I believe that a painting must give to see something other than a simple intentional message. As far as I am concerned, I would like to keep the painting in a state of "avoidance of the message,"so that in the end everyone can perceive it as he wants."

Flags, there have always been in the painting, floating in the wind or brought back to spots of bright colors, as at Manet, Van Gogh, Dufy... But the genius of Jasper Johns, twenty-four years old, all fresh landed in New York from his native Georgia, is to have completely renewed the theme by making of his canvas a flag perfectly adapted to the two dimensions of a painting, without perspective of any kind or deception. It is not, however, a ready-made genre Duchamp intended, as we know, to bring down the art of its pedestal.

If he had wanted to play the Duchamp, it would have been enough for Johns to enter the first bazaar to buy an American flag and display it without changing it. Yet its flag is both a flag and a painting without one being able neither to identify with one another nor to separate them. To achieve this, the artist made a collage of newsprint covered with a liquid wax in which he dissolved colored pigments. Johns likes that wax dries very quickly and that it keeps traces of its manipulations. The work is particularly disturbing, in these years of triumphant abstraction, for several reasons. First of all, it represents an object known to all or, rather, it presents it, out of context, as an object, without integrating it into a narrative or a description. Then it removes from its symbolism a flag eminently loaded with various meanings. Between brutality, power and extreme subtlety, the image of America capsizes. It is, no doubt, what makes Johns's Flag a superb trompe-l'esprit, at the same time as a moving pretext to show the painting, as Bonnard had done, as Ryman would.