Alison McDonaldWhy mount an exhibition of Jasper Johns’s crosshatch works, and why now?
Larry GagosianFirst of all, because I want to look at them. The crosshatches are one of the most beautiful sequences in Johns’s body of work, and they really bring the complexity of his technique, and of his experimentation with medium and surface, right to the front. They’re physical and it’s confrontational and challenging, and you don’t get that from a reproduction in a book—you need to be with them in the room.
AMAnd how do you think that experience changes a viewer’s perception of the work?
LGIt’s been said before, but this guy can really paint [laughter]. It’s Johns’s processes of working with different materials that really inspire and make him so important to other artists, not just to art history. Richard Serra looked closely at Johns when he was starting out—and you may not think that because of what Richard would go on to create, but Johns’s method of experimentation triggered something in Serra. When Brice Marden was a young artist, he worked as a guard at the Jewish Museum during that early Johns retrospective there in 1964. He stood in the galleries all day looking at Johns’s surfaces, that real, deep looking that artists—and guards—do, and it’s through Johns that Brice discovers the possibilities of encaustic that are so important to his own early works. So bringing a large group of crosshatches together for folks to really see them in all their variety is always going to feel like an important thing to do. To get a new generation of artists and collectors excited.
AMWhen was the first time you saw the crosshatches?
LGI saw their debut at Leo Castelli’s in 1976. I was lucky: I was dating a dancer in Merce Cunningham’s company and had followed her to New York. I didn’t meet Jasper at the time, but I met John Cage and Merce and got to travel with them—I remember playing chess with Cage on a tour bus when the company was on the road. It was crazy and fun and my real introduction to the art scene in New York.
AMAnd was that your introduction to Leo?
LGNo, I opened my first gallery on Broxton Ave. in Westwood Village in Los Angeles in August of 1975 with a New York–based Castelli artist (Ralph Gibson), so we’d started doing business together. Leo and I just clicked, as the saying goes. He was very open to working with me and we became great friends. Jasper’s show at Leo’s in 1976 was a revelation—not just personally to me, it was a new direction for Johns that nobody expected. It was an exciting moment. The “overall” pattern of the crosshatch moved Johns beyond any association with Pop and showed him addressing both his AbEx predecessors and the minimalist moment of the 1970s at the same time in a shocking, inventive way. He didn’t just know how to paint, he knew how to make a painting do more.
AMSo you worked with Leo as early as 1975, and on this current exhibition you’re still collaborating with Castelli Gallery.
LGBarbara Castelli and Jasper have been close friends for over thirty years. We cocurated this show, and though I’ve known Barbara for a long time, it’s our first time working on an exhibition in this way and it’s been fun. And we have Leo in common, so he’s kind of been present in the background through a lot of this, in a comforting way. Leo debuted the crosshatch works on 77th Street in January 1976, so our exhibition marks the fiftieth anniversary of that show, and it’s great that we get to do it right around the corner.
AMYou opened 980 Madison Ave. in 1989 with an exhibition of Johns’s Map paintings.
LGI did—that was a very difficult show to put together, but in the end, collectors and museums were generous and I was able to open this new space with this extraordinary body of work. It really put my gallery on the map, so to speak . . . [laughter]. In 2026 we’re moving into a brand-new gallery on the ground floor in the same building and winding down operations upstairs, so the crosshatch show feels like a nice bookend in relation to opening with Maps.
AMYou’ve titled the show Between the Clock and the Bed. Why that title?
LGThe crosshatch shows up for the first time as a panel in a multipanel work in 1972, but the first solely crosshatch work was Scent, of 1973–74. It was titled after Jackson Pollock’s last painting, Scent, 1955—so that shows you where Johns was thinking. I owned Pollock’s Scent for many years, lived with it—I bought it from Marcia Weisman, who was Norton Simon’s sister. It’s a common misconception that Johns’s crosshatches were inspired by the Edvard Munch self-portrait Between the Clock and the Bed, 1940–43, but in fact Johns had been exploring the crosshatch theme for years before he encountered the Munch. But when he did, he painted six different versions of a composition inspired by the Munch, and we were able to bring all six together for this show—not an easy feat, as three of them are very large and difficult to lend, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the National Gallery in Washington, DC, have come through for us in an extraordinary way to make this happen. I’ve always felt that for a show like this you really need to dig deep and get as many significant loans as you could possibly get. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get to do a show like this, and I couldn’t be more thankful to Jasper for his enthusiasm in helping us to realize this exhibition.
