Oh, Say Can You See?

With the advent of op art, somebody was sure to paint something not really there. And now Jasper Johns has done it, by painting a U.S. flag (reproduced on the opposite page) that appears only on the eye's retina. High school students of science know the trick: colors produce afterimages of their complements. Hence orange conjures up blue; green induces red.

In fact, Johns first got the idea eight years ago from a book on color photography. He tried it out in a collage, but the results were "awful." Then on a trip to Japan he found a young Japanese artist named Ushio Shinohara imitating his flag paintings. Shinohara gave Johns a sample--complete with a plaster hand clutching a real Coke bottle. The Japanese painting was based on black and white photographs. A dandy piece of Japanese soda pop, but the colors of the U.S. flag were all out of whack. However, it suggested to Johns that he try again to make an off-color flag whose afterimage would correct the colors into red, white and blue on the retina.

The result is currently an eye-catcher in Manhattan's Whitney Museum's annual survey of American art. It is a return to the flag paintings for which Johns had become well known, drawing the ahs of the avantgarde, the huhs of the uninitiated, and the towering wrath of the American Legion. But why repeat a color experiment most high school classes have seen? Simply because, explains Johns, he had never quite carried it through for himself: "People know well that if you drop a glass on the floor, it will break. But some go through life never dropping glasses. For me, this painting was like dropping a glass."

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