Jasper Johns The Seasons

Spring

Winter

FOR some months now, the recent four-part cycle of paintings by Jasper Johns called ''The Seasons'' has been spoken of by those who have seen it in private as a benchmark in the history not only of American art, but of American autobiography. Now that ''The Seasons'' can be seen through March 7 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, 420 West Broadway, at Spring Street, it is clear that this was not an exaggeration.

After the exhibition is over, the four big paintings will go their separate ways. The same is true of the large group of drawings, watercolors and prints, all of them closely related to ''The Seasons'' and many of them of capital importance. It therefore goes without saying that this show is a one-time-only event and should on no account be missed. It proves, among much else, that difficult and demanding major art can still be made in an age that loves to flirt with work that is as flimsy as it is immediate.

Like everything else that Johns has done over the last 30-and-more years, ''The Seasons'' is sometimes oblique and riddlesome and at other times disconcertingly direct. The four big paintings - each of them measuring 75 by 50 inches - deal with the given, as distinct from the invented. The given, in this sense, has preoccupied Johns. Ever since, he made his debut in 1955, he has painted subject matter that was not merely given but immutable, like the American flag. Even the title of his new cycle is given, after all, for what could be closer to tradition than a series of paintings called ''Spring,'' ''Summer,'' ''Fall'' and ''Winter''? Nor does Johns stint on seasonal details that likewise can be taken for granted, like the look of the leaves on the tree in ''Spring'' and ''Summer'' and the outline of the snowman in ''Winter.''

As Leo Steinberg pointed out as long ago as 1962, Jasper Johns has constantly relied for his subject matter on ''commonplaces of our environment, which possess a ritual or conventional shape, not to be altered.'' But what was read at the time as an

annihilation of the self, or as an anti-autobiography, has turned out with time to be fraught with private meaning. More recently, and notably in the paintings that made up his last New York show in 1984, he has undertaken what might be called a symphonic stocktaking. Things dear to him are listed, pored over, set down on the canvas in an idiom that is both rich and dense, and thereafter combined and recombined.

The notion of the given is still very much there, and never more so than in ''The Seasons'' and its related smaller works. It is, however, presented in a new context. As both Judith Goldman and Barbara Rose have pointed out in print, ''The Seasons'' is about a moving house, and is directly related to a painting by Picasso, dated 1955, called ''The Minotaur Moving His House.''
As Johns has recently acquired two new houses, there was an evident aptness about the image of Picasso's Minotaur piling his possessions on a cart and hauling it along. On that cart are a large painting, secured with rope, and a ladder. (The Minotaur is not usually thought of as an ardent collector, but Picasso told the photographer David Douglas Duncan that this particular painting was one he couldn't bear to leave behind.) Both rope and ladder recur throughout ''The Seasons,'' together with paintings or parts of paintings by Johns himself. There are also echoes and reprises of material already familiar to students of his work but here given a whole new significance. He does not, however, double as the fresh-faced Minotaur that we see in the Picasso. Instead, and with characteristic obliquity, he portrays himself in terms of an outline drawing of his shadow that was prepared for him by a painter friend.

-"The Seasons": Forceful Painting by Jasper Johns. By John Russell. In the New York Times February 6, 1987

Fall