Prints and Drawings
Jasper Johns (United States, b. 1930)
Black Numeral Series (0-9), 1968
Ten lithographs, each printed from one stone in black and one aluminum plate in warm gray
37 x 30 in. (93.98 x 76.2 cm) each
M.2006.66.1-.10

With Black Numeral Series, Jasper Johns created an intellectually rigorous yet sensuously beautiful work that represents the culmination and summation of the seminal first 15 years of his career.  Made in Los Angeles over a period of five weeks in 1968, Black Numeral Series (0–9) is among the most important suites of prints Johns created.

In attempting to explain Johns’ revolutionary use of flat images (numbers, flags, targets, alphabets, maps), Leo Steinberg famously observed that, unlike a sky or a street (things that can only be simulated on canvas), a painting of a number “represent[s] no more than what it actually is. For no likeness or image of a 5 is paintable, only the thing itself.”

This unprecedented merging of content and form was Johns’ cataclysmic achievement, allowing him, in his own words, “the room to work on other levels.” Notably, Johns (who has never thought of printmaking as subordinate to painting or sculpture) is one of the great printmakers of the 20th century, alongside Picasso and Matisse.

LACMA’s collection also includes, Figure 7, one of a group of encaustic paintings from 1955-56.

View the complete record and details of this work in Collections Online.

Image at top:
Peter Brenner, LACMA