Jasper Johns: Gray is an intriguing and elegant look at Johns’s sustained exploration of the color gray in paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture over the past 50 years. This book is the companion to the Johns exhibition which opened yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, running until May 4.

Carol Vogel of the New York Times interviewed the artist and the show’s curators in anticipation of the show’s opening. Here are some excerpts from that article:

For decades now [Johns’s] interpretation of flags and targets, numbers and letters — things, as he has often said, “the mind already knows,” “things that were seen and not looked at, not examined” — have become as embedded in the contemporary American art psyche as Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Jackson Pollock’s drips.

Yet until this exhibition was organized, his use of gray — as a pigment, a stenciled word, a section of crosshatching — had not been singled out for sustained attention. The show, which began at the Art Institute of Chicago, insists that attention must finally be paid to what Mr. Johns once said was his “favorite color.” …

“It was a eureka moment,” Mr. [Douglas] Druick said. “It was then we thought by tracing an idea like gray, we could look at his entire career afresh.” …

“A show as luscious and challenging as Jasper’s gray works definitely belongs here [at the Metropolitan Museum of Art],” [curator Nan] Rosenthal said.

To hear more from these and others involved with the exhibition, check out Jasper Johns: Gray, by James Rondeau and Douglas Druick. For more information on the exhibition, or to view images from it, click here.

Read the entire New York Times article by clicking here.