Painting with a Ball,

1972–73

Jasper Johns’s work both utilizes and creates ironies, contradictions, and paradoxes, much like the work of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. Johns subjects found materials to physical, spatial, perceptual, and aesthetic transformations and is often quoted as saying, “Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it.” In Painting with a Ball, what at first appears to be a monotonous black field is in fact a blanketed array of powerful, gestural lines. The print reexamines and partially reproduces Johns’s Painting with Two Balls (1960), in which the canvas is covered with colorful, impressionistic brushstrokes and two balls are lodged in a crevice—a device with a strong, rather humorous sexual charge. In the absence of the original work’s powerful color and recognizable brushwork, the print speaks to an entirely different visual language.