Paper File | Jasper Johns and John Lund at Katonah Museum of Art | CFile

Fifty-eight prints make up Jasper Johns & John Lund: Maters in the Print Studio, a current exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York (March 23 – June 15, 2014).

The exhibition follows the 30 year collaboration between artist Jasper Johns and master printer John Lund, according to the museum. They began working together in 1973 at Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island. Ten years later Lund was Johns’ exclusive printer working on the artist’s itaglio prints. Lund started a private print studio in Johns’ rural property in Connecticut in 1996, working as an on-site master printer. They created more than 70 editions together, mostly using etching and aquatint. The exhibition examines the pair’s working relationship and includes Lund’s photographs of Johns working in the studio.

In her review of the exhibition, New York Times critic Susan Hodara discusses the men’s working relationship.

“Mr. Lund is soft-spoken and humble, qualities that have surely contributed to his success in serving Mr. Johns’s vision. ‘There’s a back and forth between us, and we’ve developed a certain understanding,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I have to take control, but most of the time I’m sitting back trying to interpret his intentions and find a way to make them work. I guess I have an ability to be unnoticed but still there and useful.’

“Mr. Lund’s expert usefulness is apparent throughout ‘Masters in the Print Studio,’ as is Mr. Johns’s relentless digging. The first Low Road print, ‘Flag on Orange,’ features one of the artist’s most recognizable symbols, the American flag, floating against a sea of orange. The etching’s watery texture, achieved through spit-bite aquatint, exemplifies the interplay of the two men’s strengths.

“The newest prints in the show, from 2012, are small black-and-white lithographs of the numerals 0 to 9, a subject Mr. Johns has investigated perhaps more than any other. ‘The architecture is the same,’ Mr. Lund said, ‘but the treatments are different from anything he’s done before.'”

The show is curated by Ellen J. Keiter, the museum’s director of exhibitions, and Belinda Roth, its former interim executive director, according to the review.

Above image: Jasper Johns, Cup 2 Picasso, 1973. Photograph courtesy of the museum.

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