Last year, at Puck’s Art of Influence summit in New York, Larry Gagosian told me that he’d built his entire career on instinct rather than any grand strategy. In 1989, he opened his gallery on the top floor of 980 Madison Avenue with a show of Jasper Johns’s famous maps. Now, at the end of its 36-year run, Gagosian’s apex venue is closing with a show featuring Johns’s crosshatch paintings and drawings, from 1973 to 1983. Among them is a series based on a late Edvard Munch self-portrait called Between the Clock and the Bed, which rank as some of the most important of these works. Who knew Gagosian’s instincts leaned toward the sentimental?

The exhibition, produced in partnership with Castelli Gallery, is a fitting bookend to Gagosian’s extraordinary residency at 980 Madison. After all, there are a number of similarities between Johns and Gagosian worth noting. Very few artists or dealers are able to find success so young and then maintain their stature and relevance for decades after. In their respective realms, Gagosian and Johns are also both ubiquitous and remote. Indeed, they are such imposing fixtures that it is hard to imagine a modern art world that existed before them—or the one that will inevitably come after. Johns, in particular, was so immediately successful that many of his earliest masterworks were acquired by museums, allowing him to produce art without much in the way of financial pressure. That also means his work is not often seen, even though he is represented by Matthew Marks with not-infrequent shows. And, of course, the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art held unique, dual retrospectives of Johns’s work, titled Mind/Mirror, from September 2021 to February 2022, reminding us all of his stunning fecundity as an artist. The conceit of Mind/Mirror was that each museum created its own stand-alone Johns retrospective, but the two shows did not duplicate works or series, and instead followed one of Johns’s most consistent tropes: reflection. Which show was the original and which was the mirror image could never be discerned. The retrospective also revealed something else unique about Johns: his high-quality collector base. On loan were works owned by Marguerite Hoffman, Henry Kravis, Mitchell Rales, and Ken Griffin. Johns himself also owns a great deal of his own work, including significant pieces that are on loan to major museums. During the run of the retrospective, it was revealed that Leonard Lauder had purchased Johns’s famous sculpture of two ale cans—which had been on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art since the 1970s—directly from the artist. No one thought the deal was cheap. The other luxury Johns has been afforded is the ability to choose among the best collectors. I remember, about a decade ago, listening to a major collector mock his peers for fawning over Johns just to get access to work. But who would not want to join the ranks? As we learn from the Gagosian show, his collectors include David Geffen; Jimmy Iovine and his wife, Liberty Ross; Agnes Gund, who donated her work to MoMA; Philip Johnson, who did the same; Sydney and Frances Lewis, the founders of the once high-flying catalogue company Best, who donated theirs to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Eli and Edythe Broad; and Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman—Ronald’s brother, who has been able to hold on to much more of his art.

The Gagosian show, as I noted, focuses on Johns’s crosshatch works. But before he began experimenting with these patterns, his art depicted familiar objects—everyday signs and signifiers like flags, numbers, maps, and targets—in unfamiliar ways. The way he handled these “things the mind already knows” was different from his contemporaries in the pop art movement (once called “new realists”) in the sense that they treated familiar objects of industrial culture and consumer products as features of a natural landscape. But it was also not entirely different. Pop was concerned with the surface of things; Johns went much further and saw objects as expressions of ideas.

Both pop art and the work produced by Johns were considered rejections of abstract expressionism. In embracing the crosshatch pattern, Johns began to engage with abstraction, but as Gagosian’s Michael Cary explained to me, he could do so only within a series of arbitrary constraints about how to arrange the crosshatching patterns and which colors to use. These rules seem designed to take expression out of it. Yet on the fifth floor, Gagosian’s show delves into the many ways Johns was able to get such deep variations from relatively simple rules and patterns: Some of the works are stark black-and-white; others feature primary-color hash marks in red, yellow, and blue. One uses secondary colors—green, purple, and orange—while another has flashes of white and color throughout grey marks. I was particularly struck by an oil-and-encaustic version, painted on leather, that seemed to feature white crosshatching floating over a sea of pastel undertones.

Jasper Johns, Between the Clock and the Bed (1981). Photo: The Museum of Modern Art/Courtesy of Gagosian

Upstairs, in the central space, the show gathers the six works from the Munch-inspired Between the Clock and the Bed series. There’s some lore around these works. Supposedly, Johns got a postcard from a friend who had visited the Munch museum in Oslo, and noticed the distinctive pattern of a bedspread in the painting. Of course, the bedspread looks nothing like Johns’s crosshatch pattern. But a whole show that appeared at the V.M.F.A. in Richmond and Oslo was devoted to declaring the postcard apocryphal and suggesting a deeper connection.

Johns was entering his 50s when he painted the three large Clock and Bed-inspired works. Munch was in his late 70s when he painted his self-portrait, symbolically pinning himself between the relentless clock of aging and the increasingly remote bed of sexuality (a painting of a nude hovers in the background above the bed). It seems hard to believe that Johns—still alive more than 45 years later—was that concerned with his fading powers. It seems more likely he was engaged by the formal elements of these works. There are no figures in any of the paintings in the main gallery, but one can see a density of colors (or shading, in the case of the grey-and-white work) in each of the panels that can be read as figures or forms—even in the crosshatched pattern of the bedspread. The three large Between the Clock and the Bed works are triptychs, with panels featuring their own rules for how mark direction or color changes. Another triptych riffing on Picasso, titled Weeping Women, does something similar in primary colors. Nearby, Gagosian has hung two other works that are diptychs: End Paper, from 1976, which juxtaposes a flagstone pattern that Johns began to explore almost a decade earlier; and Corpse and Mirror, from 1974, which presents mirror images of black-and-white crosshatching—on one side, the image is made with oil paint, and on the other, it’s constructed in encaustic, a mixture of pigment and glue that has to be melted to be manipulated. The encaustic—a favorite technique of Johns’s—leaves a scumble of white across the pattern. On top of that, Johns has added an imprint of the iron used to melt and work with the glue, along with a large X—a symbol he regularly used to mark a lithography stone when he was finished with an edition and wanted to prevent further impressions. It’s an act of negation, an expression of finality that fittingly concludes Gagosian’s run atop 980 Madison.

That gallery is closing, but Gagosian’s under-construction street-level space—though not his restaurant, which remains open—will be revealed soon enough. So we have that to look forward to.

In the meantime, I’ll be back on Sunday with the results of the American art sales, particularly the big blowout success of the William Koch collection. Speak then, M