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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Paul Gray, of the Richard Gray Gallery, chalks up Johns’s relatively small number of sales to his limited productivity compared with artists like Rauschenberg. "There just isn’t that much on the market," Gray says. "In the past 10 years, we’ve sold probably half a dozen or 10 works by Johns, ranging from modest works on paper for a few hundred thousand to great sculpture for a few million and False Start for $80 million." (The New York dealers L&M Arts, Gagosian and Greenberg Van Doren also handle occasional sales.)

Matthew Marks has still another theory: "People really treasure their Jasper Johnses. When it comes time to sell, it’s the last thing that they’ll give up."

The rarity of Johns’s work helps explain why demand remains strong for his recent pieces despite the ambivalence of some critics. They have expressed frustration with what they see as the highly coded, veiled or even closeted nature of his work, which the New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman once called a "maze of peekaboo allusions and subterfuges."

Since first including a piece by Johns in a group show in 1991, Marks has given the artist two major exhibitions: a survey of drawings from 1997 to 2007 and, in 2005, a show of his "Catenary" series. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art all made acquisitions of "Catenary" pieces, whose name, derived from the Latin for "chain," refers to the curve of the string hung from two points on the nearly monochromatic, blackboardlike canvases. Demand for these works has been healthy, according to Marks, with drawings going for $400,000 to $700,000 and paintings in the range of $3 million to $6 million. Marks says his function as a dealer is "not so much about generating interest as about finding the right piece for the right person."

What does the economic downturn mean for this bellwether artist? Will more of his material come on the market? Marks hasn’t seen any change on this front to date, but, he says, "I’m waiting for the calls to start coming in."

Paul Gray views the situation differently. "I don’t think we’ll see any real change in the availability of his work," the dealer says. "But the pricing will almost certainly come down, along with nearly everything else."

"Jasper Johns" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.