Jasper Johns

American, born 1930

False Start II

© Jasper Johns and ULAE / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions.

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

False Start II

© Jasper Johns and ULAE / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions.

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

False Start II

© Jasper Johns and ULAE / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions.

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

False Start II, 1962

Artwork Details

Materials

color lithograph

Edition:

25/30

Measurements

overall: 18 x 13 3/4 inches (45.72 x 34.92 cm)

Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Credit

Charles W. Goodyear Fund, 1962

Accession ID

P1962:5.4

Throughout his career, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, Jasper Johns printed, painted, and even sculpted words as elements in his art. His False Start series of paintings and prints, to which this work belongs, is exemplary of Johns’s linguistic play. Here, he threatens to empty color names of their customary meanings by rendering them “incorrectly,” in incongruous ink colors (for example, “red” is stenciled in a dark blue-gray). The “mistakes” do not undermine the power of language or of color, but they do remind us as viewers that we are the creators of meaning in front of a work of art. 

Label from The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing, May 26–October 28, 2018