The Brooklyn Rail

Jasper Johns: Painted Bronze

It has been said that Jasper Johns’s Painted Bronze (1960) was generated by an offhand remark uttered in 1960 by the Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning. The Dutchman was apparently grousing about Johns’s suave dealer, Leo Castelli, and his ability to market works by emerging artists. “Give that son-of-a-bitch two beer cans,” de Kooning supposedly snarled, “and he could sell them.”