"pictures of Jasper Johns artin the National Gallery of Art"

“He Robert Rauschenberg was a kind of enfant terrible at the time and I thought of him as an accomplished professional. He’d already had a number of shows, knew everybody, had been to Black Mountain College in South Carolina, working with all those avant-garde people.. ..Rauschenberg focused very much on working. I was prepared to do that, too. He was also involved with Merce Cunningham dance group and totally unconcerned with his success, in the cliché term. All of the activity had a lively quality, quite separate from any commercial situation.. ... You get a lot by doing. It's very important for a young artist to see how things are done. The kind of exchange we had was stronger than talking. If you do something then I do something then you do something, it means more than what you say.”

“I made the flags and targets to open men's eyes.. .. were both things - which are seen and not looked at - examined.”

“..as an object, as a real thing in itself.”

“Painting has a nature which is not entirely translatable into verbal language. I think painting is a language, actually. It's linguistic in a sense, but not in a verbal sense. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. And I think that is true. One wants to be able to use all of one’s facilities in all aspects of one’s life.. .You may have to choose how to respond and you may respond in a limited way, but you have been aware that you are alive. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement.”

“Merce is my favorit artist in any field. Sometimes I'm pleased by the complexity of a work I paint. By the fourth day I realize it's simple. Nothing Merce does is simple. Everything has a fascinating richness and multiplicity of direction.”

“Shake parts of some of the letters in Voice . A-not-complete-unit, or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of "thought". It is not the "thought" which needs showing.. .It is not interesting and should not be shown as interesting that the parts can be shifted. It was always true that they can be shifted. 'Duchamp's ironing board'. Does Teeny Duchamp have an ironing board?”