Winter
Jasper Johns
American, born 1930
1986
An etching and aquatint in which Jasper Johns layers fractured winter motifs—dotted “snow,” ghostly figures, and circular forms—into a tactile, memory-like field to probe how ordinary images hold meaning.
The print reads in stark black-and-white: two mottled, human-shaped silhouettes flank a busy vertical strip of scratched marks and a deep, bowl-like circle, while scattered white dots and textured washes make the surface feel both eroded and animate.
Dating from Johns’s mature printmaking practice, Winter uses etching and aquatint as painterly tools to blur object and memory, continuing his project of making the familiar strange and expanding what prints can register visually and emotionally.
Medium
Etching and aquatint
Dimensions
plate: 9 13/16 × 6 9/16" (24.9 × 16.7 cm); sheet: 16 1/8 × 11 15/16" (41 × 30.4 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Emily Fisher Landau
Accession
471.1986
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
