Jasper Johns

Explore the work of the legendary post-Abstract Expressionist and minimalist Jasper Johns in an exhibition at Leslie Sacks Contemporary. A variety of Johns' cutting-edge work will be on display, including several of his iconic flag and number paintings. Leslie Sacks Contemporary, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., B6, Santa Monica. Sat. to Jan. 5. Free. Gallery hours vary. (310) 264-0640; http://www.lscontemporary.com.

If you like paint, you'll like "Richard Jackson: Ain't Painting a Pain," the artist's 40-year retrospective exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach. It's awash in the stuff. Thick, brightly colored paint oozes like mortar from between thousands of canvases stacked like bricks into a kind of room-size temple, and it's smeared in rainbows that unfurl across white walls. It's shot from a pellet gun at a big drawing and out of the rear ends of carousel animals toward spinning canvases and sculptures on surrounding walls.

It is with a duly momentous air that Matthew Marks Gallery declares its current Jasper Johns exhibition to be “the first time in Johns's more than 50-year career that he has chosen to debut a major body of work in Los An geles.” One cannot help but feel that some cosmic tide must surely have turned, for so iconic a member of the New York school to turn his attentions thus westward, with a gallery that is itself a recent high-profile transplant...

It is with a duly momentous air that Matthew Marks Gallery declares its current Jasper Johns exhibition to be “the first time in Johns's more than 50-year career that he has chosen to debut a major body of work in Los An geles.” One cannot help but feel that some cosmic tide must surely have turned, for so iconic a member of the New York school to turn his attentions thus westward, with a gallery that is itself a recent high-profile transplant...

An exhibit that examines the etchings of Jasper Johns, arguably the greatest printmaker of our time and a venerated painter, opens Tuesday at UCLA's Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery. "Foirades/Fizzles: Echo and Allusion in the Art of Jasper Johns" focuses on prints he made for "Foirades/Fizzles," an illustrated book with text by novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett.

The Greenville County Museum of Art plans to spend $5.8 million on works by pop/Abstract Expressionist artist Jasper Johns. It is one of the largest art acquisitions by any museum in the Southern region. The museum will purchase an oil painting, two watercolors, a monotype print, a drawing and 30 prints directly from Johns. All the works are from the artist's personal collection, and the price is lower than the art could bring on the open market, museum director Tom Styron said.

When Jasper Johns first started painting in the 1950s, his subjects--targets, flags, letters and numbers--were so familiar that they were, in a way, hard to see. By recasting obvious cultural symbols in an unexpected guise--painted on canvas, with loaded, gestural brush strokes--Johns posed a litany of questions about sight, perception and knowledge. The friction of those three forces charged his work with its own peculiar energy.

Jasper Johns had his first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, a Manhattan showcase most artists would kill for, and he immediately sold three paintings to the Museum of Modern Art. It was an auspicious beginning for an artist often said to be the best in the country and who commands higher auction prices than any other living artist.

Is Jasper Johns destined to become the Vincent Van Gogh of the contemporary art market? He already holds the record for contemporary art sold at auction. Now, a seminal Johns painting--billed as "the most expensive and important painting by a living artist ever to be offered at auction"--is expected to smash that record in a May 3 sale at Christie's in New York. "Diver," a 7 1/2x14-foot painting completed in 1962, is expected to fetch between $3.5 million and $4.

Somewhere in memory or imagination I saw a photograph of Marilyn Monroe visiting with Albert Einstein. It didn't make me think that Monroe was a nuclear physicist or that Einstein was a dirty old man. It made me realize that both of them were celebrities. It was sad and wry to think of Einstein as a celebrity.

Explore the work of the legendary post-Abstract Expressionist and minimalist Jasper Johns in an exhibition at Leslie Sacks Contemporary. A variety of Johns' cutting-edge work will be on display, including several of his iconic flag and number paintings. Leslie Sacks Contemporary, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., B6, Santa Monica. Sat. to Jan. 5. Free. Gallery hours vary. (310) 264-0640; http://www.lscontemporary.com.

Bond king Jeffrey Gundlach has offered a $1.7-million reward for the safe return of artworks stolen recently from his Santa Monica home. The stolen pieces, worth an estimated $10 million, included some of the biggest names in contemporary art: Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns and Richard Diebenkorn. What happens to art after it's stolen? Join us for a live video chat today at 4:30 p.m. with retired FBI agent Robert K. Wittman, who wrote the book "Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures.

Cy Twombly, an internationally renowned American artist whose lyrically evocative signature works blur the boundaries of painting, drawing and handwritten poetry, has died. He was 83. Twombly died Tuesday in Rome, where he had spent much of his time since the late 1950s. The cause of death was not immediately known, but he had suffered from cancer, the Associated Press reported. An independent figure who likened his art to an encapsulation of the creative experience, Twombly was sometimes dismissed as a minor talent or disparaged as a doodler whose loosely fashioned images, loopy texts and skeins of colored line looked too easy.

In 1989, the private Corcoran Gallery of Art, battered by threats from Congress and worried about future federal grants, canceled an exhibition by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that included male nudity and homosexual scenes. The controversial banning made the Washington art establishment seem philistine, intolerant and spineless. Times and attitudes change. Now, a Washington museum is pioneering a show that celebrates gay and lesbian art and delineates its place in the history of American painting and photography.

Arts patron gets 9 years Former international arts patron Alberto Vilar was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison for stealing from investors at his Amerindo Investment Advisors Inc. U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan announced the sentence at a hearing in Manhattan federal court, where Vilar, 69, was convicted in 2008 of all 12 criminal counts against him, including fraud and conspiracy. Vilar also was ordered to pay $21.9 million in restitution. Prosecutors said Vilar and his former Amerindo partner, Gary Tanaka, stole from clients to keep the firm afloat and to fund Vilar's philanthropic pledges and lifestyle after Internet and technology stocks plunged beginning in 2000.

MOCA: An article last Sunday about the Museum of Contemporary Art incorrectly referred to "a Mark Rothko bull's eye" painting in the museum's collection. The painting is by Elaine Sturtevant, based on a target image by Jasper Johns.

Heralding the holiday season and looking forward to a new year when income tax laws will once again encourage donations of artworks to museums, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has announced a major addition to its collection. "Map," a seminal painting by Jasper Johns, is a gift of Marcia Weisman, a founding director of the museum and a long-time art collector.

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.

Marcel Duchamp served for many years as both a prince and court jester to modern art in the 20th century. While creating some well-known works, he also punctured pretensions with jokes, pranks, aphorisms and a perpetual hunt for new byways of art. Then he announced he was abandoning art, giving it all up to play chess. But he was not telling the truth. He worked in secret for 20 years, assembling a huge, fanciful and puzzling diorama. When he died in 1968, only a few people knew about his secret.