3, 2, 1: Johns makes contact

When Andy Warhol began his “paint by numbers” series of drawings and paintings in 1962, he made sly fun of the widespread American aversion to the wilder shores of the avant-garde. For kids in the 1950s, paint-by-numbers kits had been hugely popular toys. Warhol’s grown-up versions reflected back the popular assumption that, when it came to Modern art, a 5-year-old child could indeed do that.

At the same time, these cheeky paintings stood as a lively homage to a fellow artist -- specifically, to an unfolding body of work by Jasper Johns, which is now the subject of a beautiful and absorbing traveling exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Starting around 1955, and accelerating the pace around 1960, Johns created an increasingly elaborate group of paintings, reliefs and works on paper that had numbers as their subject.

Numbers -- like the flags, maps, targets and alphabets he’s also known for -- are at the center of the conceptual revolution in late 20th century art that Johns was instrumental in launching. In the catalog to the exhibition, which is the first substantial show of Johns’ art to be seen in Los Angeles in almost 20 years, we discover that numbers have figured more prominently than any other theme in his protean career.

So far, his numbers-oeuvre includes 66 paintings and sculptures, 63 drawings and 25 series and individual prints. “Jasper Johns: Numbers” assembles 31 examples in a wide array of mediums.

And the medium is partly the message. There are fewer than three dozen works, all similarly titled, but you’ll find at least 15 materials and methods: oil paint, wax, collage, aluminum, bronze, charcoal, ink, graphite, crayon, colored pencil, chalk, intaglio, dry-point, lithography, mixed media -- and perhaps a few others I missed. Johns elaborates his subjects endlessly, arriving at vastly different effects from one work to the next.

Decades-long interest

Rather arbitrarily, the show spans the years 1955 to 1978. The admirably comprehensive catalog shows the number theme being explored as recently as 2002.

The show has been slightly trimmed from its debut last fall in Cleveland. The loss of three paintings -- including the big, chromatically splashy “0 through 9” from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art -- and one silvery Sculpt-metal relief is especially disappointing. Still, the show is excellent at focusing attention where it belongs: on the stunning philosophical implications of this materially dense and often exquisite work.

Critic Leo Steinberg put his finger on the pulse of Johns’ numbers 40 years ago, and his concise observation remains the most trenchant in all the voluminous writings about the artist since then. Steinberg zeroed in on the conceptual conundrum they exemplify.

Simply: It is not possible to paint a likeness or an image of a number.

You can paint a likeness of your mother, like Whistler did. You can paint an image of the Grand Canyon or a vase of flowers, even if you’ve never seen them, or an image of Jesus or the Buddha. But if you paint a 5, a 3 or an 8, you don’t end up with a likeness or an image. What you’ve got really is a 5, a 3 or an 8.

There is wit in this too. Numbers are abstractions. But numbers are abstractions that are also figurative. The mid-1950s hand-wringing over the future of art -- abstract or figurative? -- was sliced and diced.

Today, when adventurous figurative art has been abundant for a couple generations, it’s easy to forget how high a premium was once placed on the virtues of total abstraction. The world was a different place in 1955, when Johns first mixed some white pigment into a pot of warm, melted wax and then began to brush it onto a small canvas covered with newsprint collage to form individual numbers. The achievements of Modern art -- including newly triumphant Modern American art --were almost universally identified with abstract painting.

Yet here was a painting that followed all the rules only to arrive at a novel, strange and even deviant conclusion. The gestural marks of the brush created an abstraction that was inescapably a figure.

If there is wit here, there is also wisdom. A work of art is powerful only when it instantiates an idea, never when it merely illustrates one. (“No ideas except in things,” as poet William Carlos Williams put it.) Great art gives an amorphous concept an embodied meaning.

Take the small but critically important “Figure 5” or “Figure 7” in the show, the latter borrowed from the distinguished local collection of Robert Halff (and happily a promised gift to LACMA). They’re among the first in Johns’ ongoing numbers game.

The drawing of the numeral is a little awkward, but the buttery stokes of encaustic and the cut-up newspaper on which it’s painted together inject the world of everyday objects into the arena of art. The collage technique recalls Cubism, especially in the use of newsprint, but the look couldn’t be more different. Johns’ numeral seems carved into a hunk of the material world -- almost sculptural in its presence. But it remains a picture.

Elusive ideas

The “thingy-ness” of Johns’ work gives sensual power to elusive ideas. Seminal 1955 experiments like “Figure 7” opened the door a crack. His subsequent variations in every conceivable medium, from pencil lead to bronze, flung the door wide, deliriously elaborating the renegade faith.

“Small Numbers in Color” (1959) is painted on a block of wood, giving it the sense of a printer’s block -- and suggesting the ambiguity of individual perception in an age of mass production. The large and imposing “Numbers” (1963-1978) is formed from aluminum washed with oil paint, as if the digits had been molded in Vulcan’s forge.

“Figure 5” (1960), as tall as a standing person and one of the knockouts in the show, is as arresting -- and forbidding -- as a storm-weathered mountain. The giant, inky black figure fades in and out of positive and negative space, solid here and ephemeral there, a chunk of waxy pigment rounding a bend before dissolving like a puff of smoke.

Johns makes other sly nods to the history of art. The under-painting in “0 through 9” (1961), for example, is a lush array of vibrant color, but it’s been covered over with a wide and sensuous range of grays, from deep charcoal to off-white. Historically, the job of a gray (or grisaille) painting was to create the two-dimensional illusion of three-dimensional sculpture carved from stone -- which here gives the elusive numbers visual heft.

Insightful, self-reflexive witticisms are buried in the surfaces of many works. A torn telephone page lists numbers for paint suppliers. A rainbow-colored lithograph reproduces a newspaper column by political journalist and art collecting theorist Joseph Alsop -- a column titled “The Recall to Reality.”

The show was organized by guest curator Roberta Bernstein and former Cleveland Museum curator Carter E. Foster, who today begins a new tenure in the department of prints and drawings at LACMA. It’s deftly installed to emphasize these material and conceptual differences, and to sharpen your experience of their effects. A painting on paper might hang next to a metal relief, which hangs next to a lithograph. Or a row of charcoal drawings, all soft and velvety, leads your eye to a black-ink drawing on plastic, all puddles of liquidity. The subject of each is the same, but not the result.

From the Renaissance to the 1920s, the social and aesthetic value of art had been tied to its capacity to depict the worlds of nature and the spirit. Those values were overthrown by abstract art. It claimed revolutionary stature based on its ability to find alternatives to depiction. Johns’ paintings, drawings and prints shade the difference between abstraction and the figure, objects and their depiction. They articulate instead a spellbinding zone, where anxious beauty is the order of the day.

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‘Jasper Johns: Numbers’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; closed Wednesdays

Ends: April 18

Price: $5-$9

Contact: (323) 857-6000