JASPER JOHNS (b. 1930)

In Jasper Johns' Ale Cans (1964), the artist returned to the subject from his infamous sculpture titled Painted Bronze (1960). The subject was inspired by Willem de Kooning's remark about New York gallerist Leo Castelli: "You could give that son of a bitch two beer cans and he could sell them." In Johns' print and sculpture, the artist explored subtle differences between seemingly identical objects. For the lithograph, Johns further developed his idea of tension between related objects by indicating a distinction between the print and the sculpture. In regards to the printing process, Richard Field, the preeminent Johns print scholar, noted, "An interval of several months separated the execution of the first six stones and the seventh, the delicate border in black. The importance of this broken line should not be underestimated, for it at once separates and unites the image and the flatness of the paper." The time lapse between the stones used to create the work suggests Johns struggled with the problem of how to avoid simply executing the same subject as a print and therefore creating a rote copy of an object. His solution was the border: the broken up lines at the edge of the image emphasize that the work presents only the illusion of a three-dimensional space. Furthermore, the border reiterates that the object is a flat work on paper.