A Tale of Five Artworks

Jasper Johns, "Target" (1957–58)
Sonnabend and Johns hit it off early. While visiting the artist’s studio with her then-husband, Leo Castelli, in the late 1950s, she snapped up "Figure 1," her first Johns work. In 1962, she launched her Paris gallery with an exhibition of his flag paintings. (She showed him again there in 1966.) Castelli gave Johns his first show in 1958, at the dealer’s New York gallery, which is where Sonnabend’s future husband, Michael Sonnabend, bought "Target." Fearing that the rather small, 12-by-12-inch work might be stolen, she rarely showed it. She did, however, often display a very similar, and larger, Johns target painting that she bought several years later and that she sold in 1998 to a buyer her gallery declined to name.