Trade Secrets

Jasper Johns postcard to Castelli, March 27, 1961
Johns had his first one-man show at the Castelli gallery in 1958, when he was only 28. The Museum of Modern Art bought three works from the exhibition, including "Flag" (1958). By 1961, when this postcard was sent from his beach house on Edisto Island, South Carolina, the artist was working on a group of gray-infused canvases (some 120 works from this period were recently featured in a show at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art). But he was troubled about an upcoming solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Rive Droite: “Paintings are very hard to look at. I had to scrap my method. May have to postpone Paris show. Will know more by end of week. Jap.”

Courtesy Jasper Johns