« Cup 2 Picasso »

Jasper Johns was an exceptional contemporary American artist of the 20th century. Johns is mostly known for his paintings such as his flags, crosshatchings, targets, and numbers. Johns made the print Cup 2 Picasso in 1973. It is a lithograph of a face-cup. Johns “has always sought ideas that affect the viewer in more than one way” in an ironic approach (Francis 8). He provides a sense of illusionist space in Cup 2 Picasso where the two mirror profiles create the space in the middle as a chalice cup. It is a great example of figure-ground reversal, where the viewers sees either a goblet or pair of silhouetted faces. Significantly the side profiles in this print are of a special and particular person that Johns has chosen to use. 

The profile figure is a portrait of a famous artist who influenced Johns to become a great artist. The artist is none other than Picasso himself. In his article, “Two Master Printmakers in the Shadow of Picasso,” Christopher Lyon argues that Johns became quite a great printmaker in part through his respect for Picasso. When Picasso had passed away in 1973, Johns created the lithograph, Cup 2 Picasso, in commemoration. “A number of artists, including Johns, had been invited to contribute prints to an album honoring Picasso” (Lyon 8). The main idea and concept of this special print was “to make a chalice or toasting cup honoring Picasso out of facing profiles of the artist” (Lyon 9). The profiles of Picasso originally came from a photographic portrait of him, which Johns traced over to get the image for Cup 2 Picasso. Johns flipped the profile to get both the left-side and right-side profile of mirror images facing each other to make the cup (Castleman 48). 

Even though Cup 2 Picasso was in honor of Picasso, the reference idea came from another artist that also influenced Johns. Marcel Duchamp was known to have influenced Johns in terms of conceptual art (Bernstein 59). The reference came from Duchamp’s Self-Portrait which had a black profile of his face and was made in 1958. The concept initially came from the idea of a “shadow cast” that has been traced onto a piece of paper (Bernstein 120). References and influences from Duchamp were not limited to Cup 2 Picasso. There have been countless other art works that Jasper Johns has taken into consideration as inspiration and motivation to do his pieces from studying Duchamp’s other art works.