One of the universal characteristics of all great art is that it rewards sustained looking. Too often, we walk through a museum glancing at each work for only a minute or so, occasionally lingering over one picture for two or three or maybe four. And four minutes can feel like a long time when you’re in a gallery with ten or twenty other works you want to see. But when you slow down and spend longer getting to know one particular work, it gradually opens up and begins to reveal its secrets. The other day, at the Jasper Johns show in Philadelphia, I spent a good long while looking at one of my favorite of his paintings, the encaustic on canvas Usuyuki, from 1982. It belongs to a museum in Japan, so this was the first time I had seen it in person.
This is a large, complex painting that takes a while to decipher. And as each of its secrets is revealed, the pleasure of looking at it increases. The title, Usuyuki, means light snow in Japanese. The word, I’m told, also suggests something that disappears as it becomes visible, as a snowflake melts when it hits the ground.
The first thing you notice about this work is its overall format: a large, colorful, horizontal rectangle, divided equally into three vertical panels. Look a little longer and you see that each of those vertical panels is divided into three horizontal panes, for a total of nine. Each of those nine panes is further divided into three vertical panels, giving us a total of twenty-seven small, vertical panels. So, what we have is a horizontal rectangle divided into three vertical panels, each of which is subdivided into three horizontal rectangles divided into three vertical panels.
Look a little longer and you begin to notice that each of those twenty-seven small vertical panels is in the same proportion as the three large vertical panels—roughly two-to-one (2:1). And each of the nine horizontal panes is in the same proportion as the overall work, roughly 1.6 to 2, otherwise known as the golden proportion or golden section. This ancient term describes the proportions of a rectangle which when divided into two parts, one of them with four equal sides, yields a remaining rectangle of proportions identical to the original, and which can be divided again in exactly the same manner, ad infinitum. (Note: You can pretty easily gauge the two-to-one proportion of the verticals by eye. I had to measure a reproduction after I got home to arrive at the proportions of the horizontals.)
Now take a look at the arrangement of colors. Starting with the left-hand panel, the bottom pane is generally yellow. The one above it is green, and the one above that, blue, following the order of colors in the spectrum of visible light: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.
Moving from left to right, the next thing you notice is that the color arrangement shifts up one step with each step to the right. The bottom, left-hand yellow panel has moved up to the middle of the center panel, with the same green rectangle above it, pushing the blue panel out of the frame. And a new panel, this one with a red background, has appeared beneath the yellow, again following the arrangement of the spectrum. And in the right-hand panel, the yellow and red rectangles have shifted up again, with yellow now at the top, and red in the middle. The green panel has now been pushed up, out of the frame, and a new panel, with yellow hash marks over a background in shades of violet has appeared at the bottom. (Which, incidentally, mirrors the bottom left panel, with its violet hash marks over a yellow background.)
Taking a deeper dive into the painting’s structure, you’ll note that, just as the horizontal panes shift to the right with each step upward, within each horizontal pane the small vertical panels shift one step to the left each time the horizontal panel moves right and upward. You can notice this from the pattern of hash marks within those vertical panels.
To see how that works, look at the lower left-hand horizontal pane, the yellow one with violet hash marks. Call its three vertical panels A, B, and C, with A at the left. Now focus on the middle one, panel B. At the left side of this panel is a pattern of five graduated vertical lines, violet against the yellow-orange background, each one slightly taller than the one to its left. If you shift your focus to the next horizontal yellow pane, one step up and one to the right, you’ll notice that panel B, with its pattern of five vertical lines, now appears one step to the left of where it was, taking the place of panel A. On closer inspection, you’ll also note that panel C, with its own distinctive pattern of hash marks, has moved left as well, and now appears as the middle panel of the central yellow pane. And panel A, which you can recognize from its pattern of five horizontal lines, now reappears at its right, where C was originally. And if you again follow the yellow rectangle one step up and one to the right, panel A, with its five horizontal lines, is now in the middle, having shifted one step to the left, with panel B reappearing at its right. So within the three yellow horizontal panes, as they move stepwise up and right, their three vertical panels are configured ABC, BCA, and CAB, respectively.
Every one of the nine horizontal panes follows this same pattern, with each of its vertical subdivisions shifting one step to the left with every move of the horizontal pane up and to the right. What’s truly miraculous and mind-bending about this, at least to my eye, is that in every shell-game-like configuration of panes and panels, the hash marks all continue uninterrupted across all boundaries, both vertical and horizontal, connecting seamlessly with the hash marks in the adjacent pane. It’s a scheme that could have been devised by M.C. Escher. And yet it is painted with great freedom and spontaneity. The hand of the artist is evident everywhere.
Return now to the arrangement of colors. The background color of each horizontal pane, as noted previously, follows the order of the spectrum as the eye moves vertically up the canvas: the left-hand panel has a yellow pane at the bottom, with a green one above it, and a blue one above that. On closer inspection, the background colors actually move upwards in subtly graduated fashion. For example, the lower left-hand pane is orange at the bottom, shifting to lemon yellow towards the top. And in the pane above it, the background is yellow-green at the bottom, shifting to blue green at the top, as it approaches the blue background above. Each of the nine rectangles follows this same, spectrum-order transition to the one above, although some make the transition more gradually than others.
But wait, there’s more. Just as the background color is graduated upwards in each horizontal pane, it also graduates from left to right. Starting again at the lower-left pane, the yellow background becomes more orange as the eye moves left to right, leading in spectrum-like fashion to the reddish rectangle to its right, followed in turn by the lower right-hand panel with its background in shades of violet. This graduated pattern is repeated in each horizontal band, just as it was in the vertical panels.
Just in case you thought that was all, take a look at the hash marks themselves. From pane to pane they follow the same spectrum order of colors, but with wider jumps. In the large left hand panel the marks are violet in the bottom pane, red in the middle, and orange at the top. Each panel exhibits the same pattern of color shifts in its hash marks. And they do exactly the same thing moving left to right across the canvas.
There’s something about this dazzlingly complex scheme of pattern, color, and geometry, that imbues the painting with tremendous vitality. It speaks to the nearly infinite variety of life on earth, the deep satisfaction of discovering order within an apparently chaotic system, and the transcendent recognition of the interconnectedness of all things. It is a tremendously optimistic work of art, full of mystery and light.
And, yet there’s more left to discover. I am still puzzling over the superimposed figures with dark outlines—one circle, two vertical ovals (actually, it might be two-and-a-half), and six figures, either whole or in fragment, shaped more or less like molars. They seem to anchor particular spots on the canvas, and in some cases appear to join two panels together (similar to the way Johns, in earlier multi-panel works, employed hinges and other visible hardware to attach the various canvases to each other). And they keep your eyes dancing across the canvas like little chrome spheres in a pinball machine.
You can’t quite keep track of them all at once, either. As you notice each one in turn, you lose track of another, almost like successive snowflakes that melt upon hitting the ground.
But I suspect these shapes serve another purpose I haven’t divined yet. Perhaps if I spend another hour looking at Usuyuki, that, too, will become clear.
