Four Panels from Untitled 1972

Like much of Johns's work in lithography, Four Panels from Untitled relates to a painting on canvas to which objects have been affixed. The cross-hatchings, used here for the first time and so named by Johns, and the flagstone patterns are interrelated in the way they came into being. Both were seen from a car window; the former derived from designs the artist saw fleetingly on a car on the Long Island Expressway. The flagstone pattern he also glimpsed briefly on a painted wall in Harlem. When he returned to photograph the site, he could not find it, so recreated it from memory. Johns was partial to both these motifs, although he employed the cross-hatching more expansively. 'It had all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of complete lack of meaning. They become very complex with the possibilities of gesture and nuances that characterize the material—color, thickness, thinness—a large range of shadings that became emotionally interesting.'

With the exception of the slats and casts in panel D, Four Panels from Untitled is largely non-representational. The whole evolves from the left to the right, with links made by way of the embossing, and then revolves back from D to A through the embossed pattern of the slats. The four lithographs, by virtue of their flatness and subtle embossing, are more unified than the painted version, which was hung without spaces between the panels. Panel D, in its coloration and fragmented casts, stands a bit apart from the other three, perhaps as a reminder that Johns's art is more than purely decorative.