S.C.'s native son is world's most successful artist
By Warner M. Montgomery
Warner@TheColumbiaStar.com

Jasper Johns

The audience hushed. Temple Ligon stood in the darkened American Legion Post 6 Hut before the monthly meeting of The Torch Club. For an hour of non- stop eloquence, Ligon lectured on his favorite artist, Jasper Johns. As best I could, given the rapid- fire facts and images, I grabbed the essence of the world's most successful painter.

Jasper Johns was born May 15, 1930, in Augusta because there was no hospital in Allendale. His mother deserted him and his father when Jasper was one. His father, a law school graduate of Wake Forest, preferred drinking to lawyering so Johns's grandfather had to take over with the help of his second wife, Montez.

When he was seven, Johns was bounced over to his uncle and aunt. After a year that didn't work out, and he went back to Montez and his grandfather.

Johns's grandfather died in 1939 when Johns was nine. He moved to Columbia to live with his rediscovered mother and her second husband, Robert E. Lee, in Wales Garden. Lee was an IRS agent.

John Temple Ligon

Johns walked to A. C. Moore Elementary School and sat next to Susan McElveen (now Graybill) for the duration of his fourth grade year. His mother left Columbia for Rock Hill after a year and Johns was shuttled off to his widowed aunt, Gladys Johns Shealy, and her four boys, all about Jasper's age. They lived on the western shore of Lake Murray. He attended Climax School in The Corner community until he was 16.

The summer before the 11th grade, he moved to Sumter to live with his mother who had just moved there from Orangeburg. He attended Edmunds High School, where he was class valedictorian.

Upon graduation in 1947, Johns moved to Columbia and enrolled at USC and majored in art. His teachers were Catharine Phillips Rembert, Augusta Rembert Wittkowsky Walsh, and Dr. Edmund Yaghjian.

Johns left USC after three semesters and moved to New York City in search of fame and fortune. He was drafted into the Army and sent to Ft. Jackson. During his two- year term, he did art and training films.

Jasper spent time working with Dr. John Craft of the newly- established Columbia Museum of Art. They set up an art program for soldiers at the museum.

After the Army, Johns went back to New York City and moved into a SoHo loft. In 1954, he destroyed everything he kept of his artistic production up to that time.

In the same year, he dreamed the American flag and painted it. In 1958, his red, white, and blue Flag was hung in the Museum of Modern Art, where it still is. His White Flag was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $20 million in the 1990s. Jasper Johns's painting, False Start (1959), was sold by David Geffen in 2006 for a record $80 million.

Today, at age 76, Jasper Johns lives a quiet life in Connecticut. He regularly produces five or six paintings a year.

The Torch Club meets monthly for a meal and a talk by a member. If you are interested in listening and speaking to meaty and often controversial lectures, call Ed Latimer (803-776-4765) for information.