Usuyuki, 1979

Jasper Johns is one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era, whose work helped reshape the course of contemporary art by bridging Abstract Expressionism with the emergence of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. While his flags, targets, numbers, and maps became defining images of twentieth-century American art, Johns continually reinvented his visual language. During the 1970s, the crosshatch emerged as one of his most important abstract motifs: clusters of parallel marks arranged in shifting directions that allowed him to explore repetition, symmetry, perception, and the boundary between gestural expression and geometric order. The crosshatch works are now regarded as a central chapter within Johns’s career and demonstrate the extraordinary importance of printmaking to the development of his ideas.

*Usuyuki*, 1979, is a particularly refined example of this celebrated crosshatch vocabulary. The Japanese word “usuyuki” translates as “light” or “thin snow” and was associated by Johns with the fleeting quality of beauty—an idea reflected in the work’s delicate palette and rhythmic, overlapping marks. Rather than directing the viewer toward a single recognizable image, the composition creates a constantly shifting visual field in which pattern, color, and space appear to advance and recede across the surface. Executed as a lithograph in colors on Arches paper, *Usuyuki* was published by Universal Limited Art Editions in a small edition of just 49, with seven additional artist’s proofs, and is recorded as ULAE 202. Measuring approximately 34 ⅜ × 50 ⅜ inches (87.3 × 127.9 cm), the work is hand-signed, dated, and numbered in pencil.