I remember when I first moved to New York many years ago feeling confused and uneasy about the American flag.  It seemed to be everywhere: on most suburban houses, in every public building, and in my kids’ classrooms.  Its ubiquity puzzled me at first.  Only later did I start to understand the powerful position the flag occupies in the stories that Americans tell themselves and the world all the time.  How do you unify more than 300 million people with roots in every country of the world?  How do you hold together a relatively new nation?  By telling stories over and over again, by promoting icons and symbols around which people with little else in common can congregate.  Stories are the glue that stops America fracturing under the pressure of so many conflicting expectations.

No American artist has thought about the flag more than Jasper Johns.  He has painted it time and time again in a career lasting more than sixty years.  When the Royal Academy in London announced its retrospective of his career, the first in the UK for more than forty years, I realized I couldn’t think of a single one of his paintings that wasn’t a representation of that flag.  Is there another contemporary painter so closely identified with a single image?

Good exhibitions should disrupt what you think you know about an artist and this one certainly does.  The flags prove to be a small part of his oeuvre and were concentrated in the earliest phase of his career (in the late 1950s).  I had no idea about the diversity of his work: the bronze sculptures and aluminum casts, the incorporation of household items (coat hangers, spoons, and string) into later canvases, and so on.

I know a lot more about Jasper Johns than I did (thank you, RA), but I keep thinking about those flags.  What this extraordinary artist made me realize was that the flag has no objective meaning.  It’s simply a colorful surface, an arrangement of shapes, onto which we project our own meanings and feelings.  It’s worth thinking about that for a moment in these days when flags and anthems are very much in the news, and it’s worth considering what can happen when those who are powerful, corrupt, and manipulative try to convince us that symbols can only have one, “true” meaning.