Hasta La Ideas

While it’s difficult to find a photo of the late Robert Rasuchenberg without a puckish grin, Jasper Johns tends to confront cameras with an expression of steely bemusement that stops just short of a glower. We like to think of it as encaustic personified. But don’t mistake Johns’s intensity for humorlessness, notes James Rosenquist in his memoir, Painting Below Zero, due out in October from Knopf. The New York Post‘s Page Six yesterday offered this excerpt from the book in which Rosenquist recounts a delightful Johnsian joke.

While [Johns] was working on a project with Edward Albee, he told me this joke using his high ecclesiastical voice. [He goes]: ‘This turtle was walking along and it was robbed by two snails. The turtle called the police, and when they asked him [what happened], the turtle said, ‘Well I don’t know, everything happened too fast.’ He’s an eccentric.

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