Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was one of the leaders of the Pop Art movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although Johns studied at the University of South Carolina for three semesters, and spent a brief stint enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in New York City prior to serving in the Korean War, he is largely considered a self-taught artist.
Johns had his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in 1958—from which the Museum of Modern Art purchased three pieces. His work has since been the subject of major exhibitions all over the world, at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The artist has also received numerous honors throughout his career, including the National Medal of Arts in 1990, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. In 2018, The New York Times referred to Jasper Johns as the United States’ “foremost living artist.”