Perilous Night

<p>Jasper Johns began his career in the mid-1950s by re-creating, with great precision, such familiar images as targets, letters, numbers, and flags. Although his subject matter has become less commonplace, he continues to “borrow” from the public domain. <em>Perilous Night</em>, for instance, owes its title to a pivotal and expressive piece of music written by the American composer John Cage (1912–1992) in 1945. Both score and cover sheet are rendered on the right-hand side of the drawing with Johns’s characteristically fluid handling of ink. On the sheet’s left side is a freehand rendition—abstracted, reversed, and turned ninety degrees—of a single, terror-stricken soldier from the Resurrection panel of Matthias Grünewald’s sixteenth-century masterwork the Isenheim Altarpiece (Unterlinden Museum, Colmar). Between the soldier and the musical score is a black imprint of Johns’s right arm, evidence perhaps of the creative power that can merge two disparate images into a cogent statement. The overcome soldier witnessing the Resurrection of Christ and a piece of music marking a key transition in a composer’s career both point to “perilous nights” that can change the course of a human life. Characteristically, Johns also explored the same subject in different media. This somberly colored drawing derives from a painting of the same name (1982; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).</p>