Courtesy Christie's

"Figure 4" (1959) set an auction record for Jasper Johns when it earned $17.4 million at Christie's New York in May 2007.

Private collection, courtesy L&M Arts, New York

"Corpse and Mirror" (1975-76), a work on paper, sold privately through L&M Arts.

From the Files

+ Small False Start, 1960, a painting on board, brought $4 million at Christie’s 1989. At 21.9 by 18.5 inches, it’s almost one-ninth the size of False Start, 1959, which earned the recordsetting $17 million at the house in 1988.

+ When Christie’s sold the celebrated Sally and Victor Ganz collection, in 1997, one of the top lots (after several Picassos) was the large Johns collage-painting Corpse and Mirror, 1974, which went for $8.4 million.

+ According to Anthony Grant, at Sotheby’s, Johns’s prints “go for anywhere from $5,000 to $300,000 for alphabets or targets or some map prints, and monotypes can be even more expensive.” Sotheby’s has auctioned “Color Numeral” lithographs — 10 prints, from circa 1968, featuring the numbers 0 through 9 — for as much as $770,000.

+ A longtime collector of the artist’s work, the late writer/producer Michael Crichton wrote the catalogue for the 1977 Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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It’s hard to find a work that has defined the heights of the art market over the past two decades more dramatically than Jasper Johns’s oil False Start, 1959. The canvas, in which splashes of bright colors meet the words representing them — or, more precisely, misrepresenting them, with gray written in red, orange in white and so on — is etched into the memory of anyone who attended the New York evening sale on November 10, 1988. On the 9th, Johns’s encaustic-and-newsprint White Flag had fetched $7 million at Christie’s, making him the most expensive living artist at auction. The next night, Johns surpassed his own record, as False Start earned $17 million at Sotheby’s. (Johns was ultimately surpassed by Damien Hirst, in 2007.)

"It was a watershed moment," says Matthew Marks, who now represents the artist. "You try not to pay attention to these things, but it’s hard."

The record-breaking painting went to Larry Gagosian, bidding for the magazine magnate Si Newhouse. A few years later, Newhouse sold it privately to the entertainment mogul David Geffen. He then unloaded it for $80 million, via Chicago’s Richard Gray Gallery — a secondary-market dealer of Johns’s work — to the Chicago hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin. To say the least, the painting has a high-powered provenance.

But Johns — at age 78, actively working and receiving serious, if not always glowing, reviews — has something more valuable than a record: one of the most powerful and persistent markets of all contemporary artists. The death, in 2008, of his onetime lover and collaborator, Robert Rauschenberg, has only heightened Johns’s own historical, larger-than-life significance and the tremendous interest in his work.

Born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, Johns was primarily raised by relatives after being abandoned by his parents. Art, though, was a constant. "I started drawing when I was three and never stopped," he once said. He decamped for New York as soon as he could, at age 18.

By 1958 he had had his first solo show, with Leo Castelli. It was visited by Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which bought four works from the exhibition: Flag, 1954; Green Target, 1955; Target with Four Faces, 1955; and White Numbers, 1957. All are paintings with a sculptural edge, combining such materials as encaustic, newspaper and, in the case of Target with Four Faces, plaster casts in relief.

Johns’s works from the mid to late 1950s, typically viewed as his period of rebellion against Abstract Expressionism, remain his most sought after. In 2007 an encaustic, oil and collage on canvas from 1959, Figure 4, sold at Christie’s for $17.4 million, narrowly edging out False Start for his top price at auction. The work explores the slippery reality of representation: Is the numeral four, painted in the same bright colors as the background, to be read as a number or as the image of a number? "What was extraordinary about this picture," says Laura Paulson, the international director of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, "was that it was owned for a long time by Nina Sundell, the daughter of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, and it’s in fantastic condition."

It was also in 1959 that Johns painted White Numbers, which brought $7.9 million at Christie’s in 1997, and Jubilee, which went for $5 million at Sotheby’s in 1991. "It was an important year for Jasper, and the works he made then, in that middle ground between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, are really coveted," says Anthony Grant, senior international specialist in contemporary art at Sotheby’s, adding that the most valuable works from this time are "monumental paintings for Johns, who is basically an easel-scale painter."

In the 1960s, Johns further developed some of the key themes he established in the ’50s, such as the numerals, flags, alphabets and targets. All of these, says Paulson, "deal with counting, measurement and repetition. He found a way to make that mundaneness very beautiful." And expensive: Three of his top 10 auction records are held by works dealing with flags.