"This volume is the first full-length monograph on Jasper Johns, whose work has earned a historic place for itself by sparking much of American and, indeed, world art since the mid-1950s. [...] [Kozloff] traces Johns' pictorial development, probes the often complex overlaps of the artist's thought, identifies stylistic changes, and deals with the iconography of Johns' work - the kinds of objects he chooses, how he treats them, and in what contexts he places them. As he underlines the recurring patterns of subject, theme, and object, Mr. Kozloff brings out Johns' cyclical conceptions and clarifies the artist's most puzzling motifs - explaining their differences from those in Pop art, interpreting their affinity with the vision of Marcel Duchamp, and establishing their origin in the Symbolist tradition. Seeing contradiction, displacement, and paradox as the keys to Johns' artistic procedures, Mr. Kozloff gives detailed technical analyses of such controversial elements of the artist's work as the opposition between surface and illusion, and the contrast between representation and reality. He recognizes, assimilates, and applies the remarkably wide range of critical approaches - philosophical, iconographic, formal, and historic - that Johns' work solicits. Together with the copious illustrations, in color and black-and-white, of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, this presentation is in itself a model of critical approach to a very important artist." -- from interior flap. Includes list of plates and bibliography. Printed in black-and-white, with color images tipped-in.