Fragment - according to what - leg and chair

A kitchen chair and a leg float upside down in Jasper Johns’ curious lithograph. With his images and titles, Johns aims to provoke, puzzle, and disturb – much like Marcel Duchamp, whom he greatly admires.

Johns regards printmaking as a way to develop ideas from his paintings. He often remixes fragments from earlier works, interested in how images are recycled over time. The leg and chair here are taken from his 1964 painting According to what.

From the late 1970s, the National Art Gallery began to acquire works on paper by important international artists like Johns, as a more affordable way of representing these modern masters within the collection.