Rago Auctions

Jasper Johns’s 1969 Lead Reliefs enshrined several of the artist's recurrent visual themes, including the infamous flag. By presenting ordinary objects—a lightbulb, flag, shoe, toothbrush and book, and bread—with the stark gravitas of lead, Johns continued his project of questioning and critiquing the representation of recognizable things—what he has called “things the mind already knows.” Johns certainly takes his own liberties with his chosen subjects as well: in The Critic Smiles, for example, the toothbrush (which Johns often used to represent the critic) has four teeth cast in gold by a dentist instead of bristles, what Robert Bernstein describes as "a rebus-like translation of the object's compound name.” 

Johns worked with Gemini G.E.L. to create these works, which are his only departure from lithography with the publisher. From Johns's initial molds, cast metal and epoxy forming molds were created, after which a soft sheet of lead only 0.15 inch in thickness was shaped in the molds. Then, the embossment was fixed to a polystyrene backing with wooden supports and framed. As the G.E.L. Lead Reliefs catalogue notes, “the production of the reliefs, which was experimental and innovative all the way, brought to light the fact that greater fidelity to the original was a characteristic of soft materials. One sees more details of the Flag, for example, in the embossed reliefs than the cast bronze versions.”