Duchamp voiced an immediate concern: “who’s going to do all the work?”, but was pleased with the idea once it was established that it wouldn’t be him. Over dinner at Marcel Duchamp’s New York home, Johns suggested to his friend – the choreographer Merce Cunningham – that they make a dance piece incorporating an artwork by their host, The Large Glass. Puzzling over Johns’s early work, the experimental composer (and friend of the artist) John Cage suggested that “looking closely helps, though the paint is applied so sensually there is the danger of falling in love”. The paint sets very fast, allowing him to work quickly and preserve the textured surfaces. Throughout his career Johns has used the ancient method of encaustic: heating beeswax, tree sap and pigment and layering it onto the canvas, “as evenly as one would frost a cake”, according to Johns expert Barbara Rose. He was still in his twenties when he painted this particular flag in 1958, but already had a solo show at the taste-making Leo Castelli Gallery and his work added to the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

He approached the flag as an object, rather than a symbol – this painting “is no more about a flag than it is about a brushstroke or about a colour or about the physicality of the paint”, as he said in 1965. That gave me room to work on other levels'. For Johns, “using the flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it.

Jasper Johns first painted the American flag in 1954–1955 aged 24, and it’s been a frequently recurring motif in his practice ever since.

Jasper johns letters