The Emotional Jasper Johns: A New Exhibition Reframes an American Icon

Inside Jasper Johns: Night Driver at the Guggenheim Bilbao, a film of Walkaround Time (1968) flickers alongside the translucent set pieces Johns designed for American choreographer Merce Cunningham’s dance. Based on Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, the structures appear improbably light within Frank Gehry’s titanium landmark. Visitors drift among them, becoming performers of a sort themselves.

Night Driver feels less like a portrait of a solitary genius than a story about artistic exchange. For Enrique Juncosa, the exhibition’s curator, Johns’ creative relationships are central to understanding both the artist and his work.

Elaborating on Walkaround Time, the curator tells me: “Johns was artistic adviser for the Merce Cunningham Company from 1967 to 1980. [Robert] Rauschenberg held this title before, from 1954 to 1964. Johns, however, did not involve himself often to make costumes and sets. His major work for the company was Walkaround Time… It seems that the idea for the dance came from a conversation that Johns and Cunningham had at an evening in Duchamp’s house.”

Juncosa continues: “I think these relationships were especially important at the beginning of his career, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Johns said about meeting Rauschenberg that he was the first professional or serious artist he had met… [John] Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns were very close friends, and all of them major artists; surely their friendship encouraged them all and helped them to develop their own different works.”

The exhibition’s chronology demonstrates this point. Johns’ work emerged from a post-war New York milieu comprising figures who collectively helped redraw and blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, music and performance. This context is important. In Night Driver, Johns’ familiar icons are here – flags, targets, maps, numbers – but they appear less as isolated inventions than as touch points in a wider creative network.

“Both Johns and Duchamp thought the spectator had the last word to interpret art, and I wanted the public in Bilbao to move around the sets as if they were on stage, as if becoming part of the work,” Juncosa shares. The result is one of the exhibition’s most memorable moments.

Elsewhere, Night Driver continues to broaden the story of artistic kinship. Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett appears not simply as a literary influence but as a collaborator. “Johns loved Beckett’s work. He only did one artist book and he did it with Beckett in the 70s. He also gave Beckett’s name to one of his later works from 2005,” Juncosa points out.  

The Foirades/Fizzles project, shown among a rich selection of works on paper is very much a dialogue rather than a monologue. Nearby are small drawings gifted to friends, exchanges with fellow artists, and works that trace lines back to figures as varied as Duchamp, Cézanne and de Kooning. The show continually returns to the idea that art is made not in isolation but in conversation.

Night Driver is an emotional show. The title itself comes from a 1960 drawing that Johns described as his first work based on a personal feeling. Throughout the exhibition, Juncosa draws out a quieter, more vulnerable Johns than the one often presented in art history surveys. “I do find Johns’ show very emotional, sometimes even tragic, in spite of his reputation of being hermetic and detached, or the fact that he does not give much information about his works,” he says.

That emotional current emerges through colour or, more often, its absence. The recurring greys that run through the exhibition feel all the more striking against the bright Basque sunlight pouring through the museum’s vast spaces. “I chose many grey works, from In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O´Hara (1961) onwards, to emphasise the more melancholic, nocturnal and romantic aspects of his oeuvre,” the curator explains.

The exhibition is attentive to concealment as much as revelation. Johns repeatedly leaves clues while withholding conclusions. “Johns’ paintings are done or finished with astonishing delicate detail, they often suggest hidden information, like in Canvas (1959), Souvenir (1964) or Drawer (1957). The fact that he hides information, like a skull that he finally deleted in Memory of My Feelings, is very revealing.”

That tension between disclosure and secrecy inevitably touches aspects of Johns’ personal life. His romantic relationship with Rauschenberg, now well documented, remains present as an undercurrent rather than an explicit theme. “The Seasons and The Bath series, from the 1980s, are very autobiographical. Also, I chose to present many works on paper, almost a show within the show, which by nature are intimate and even almost secret.” There are hints of intimacy, coded references, fragments of memory and longing, but rarely anything offered directly. The effect is moving precisely because it resists easy explanation.

Building a compelling retrospective of nearly 140 works spanning seven decades is no easy task, yet Night Driver avoids becoming overly encyclopaedic. Through the show, Johns emerges as a crucial bridge figure, rejecting the grand gestures of Abstract Expressionism while opening pathways towards Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. The exhibition’s real achievement lies in showing that these intellectual innovations were inseparable from human relationships.

By the time I stepped back outside into the late afternoon sunshine, Gehry’s museum glowing against the river, what lingered was not Johns the icon-maker, nor Johns the precursor of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. It was Johns, an artist shaped by friendships, exchanges and affections. Night Driver argues persuasively that the emotional force of his work lies not in confession but in traces of people, of memories, of connections that remain just visible beneath the surface.

Jasper Johns: Night Driver is on view at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao until 12 October 2026.




Feature image: Installation view of Jasper Johns: Night Driver at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Courtesy Guggenheim Museum Bilbao