Jasper Johns: Copy/Trace - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Discover a defining through line across Jasper Johns's influential career through his methods of replication and revision in Jasper Johns: Copy/Trace.

Among the most prominent and inventive American artists of the past century, Jasper Johns first gained renown for his use of common objects, repeated motifs, and found imagery. Over seven decades, Johns has shaped and transcended art movements including pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art--and his work continues to surprise, delight, and expand the definition of what art can be.

Jasper Johns: Copy/Trace offers a fresh perspective on the artist's celebrated career by focusing on the processes of copying and tracing that recur throughout his work. Whether by copying one of his own paintings, leaving an imprint of the body, or tracing an existing image through a translucent support, Johns has repeatedly returned to these methods of representation across a wide range of media. Published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Jeffrey Weiss at David Zwirner, New York in 2026, this book features drawings and prints from the 1960s through the 2010s that highlight the complex implications of Johns's seemingly straightforward operations. A new essay by Weiss illuminates this significant through line in the artist's practice and reveals how meaning and making are inseparable in his work.

About the Author

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) was born in Augusta, Georgia and briefly studied art in South Carolina before moving in 1953 to New York, where he spent the majority of his adult life. He had his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. In 2021, the two-venue retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror was on view simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Johns lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut.

Jeffrey Weiss is an independent curator and critic regarded for his monographic exhibitions and extensive scholarship on twentieth-century European and American art. Between 2010 and 2018, he was a senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where, with Francesca Esmay, he co-organized the Panza Collection Initiative, an eight-year study project devoted to the institution's vast holdings in minimalist and post-minimalist art. Weiss organized the celebrated 2007 exhibition Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965 during his tenure at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, where he was curator and head of modern and contemporary art from 2000 to 2008.