What's a signature mean?

I ask because I don't know. It could mean nothing. It could add to the meaning of a work. In Jasper Johns' case, it certainly means at least one thing: big $$. But I want it to mean more.

I started thinking about Johns' signature because I went to his show of drawings from 1997-2007 at Matthew Marks Gallery (NYC, through April 12). I noticed in the end of his show that he marked some of his drawings with very precise signatures. It's not just his signature on this handful of pieces. It's "J.Johns / March '06 / St. Martin, F.W.I."

I recently wrote about Johns' "Gray" show at the Met. The show has been trashed online, but I thought it was a tidy retrospective of someone who is still a major force. To sum up: I love his early work, and his later work (after the cross-hatching hayday) leaves me cold and confused. I've been thinking about it since I first wrote about Johns, but now I've got a few thoughts I'll try to add.

It's easy to focus on the ways Johns broke from the previous generation. Johns' debt to the abstract expressionists used to escape me. He's frequently pegged as a pop precursor, which isn't entirely inaccurate.

But seeing the gray paintings, it really struck me how much he owes to their approach to creating a canvas. He's an all-over painter. He sticks to the surface and deals with relationships there. I think it's why the paintings of his I like the most take subjects that are already flat, like targets and flags and maps.

I love Jasper Johns' brushwork. I love the way he can mix paints and let colors (even gray ones) rain onto a canvas in an all-over way that's visually interesting without seeming contrived or over-designed. There's a nervous energy to his brush strokes, a kind of brutal, abrupt elegance to the way he stops and starts.

When you're painting something from life, color adjustments between light and dark and big and small blobs of paint usually describe physical space. You can highlight the tops of cheeks with light mark, model the shadow in dark. But when you deal with Johns, that approach is completely shot. You have a target. Sometimes he'll make a circle in the target lighter or darker (though he frequently erases the color differences) but it's not to describe something in reality. He's not referring to anything but the design. It's pointless to look at a painting of Johns and ask "How big is that flag in real life?"

But when you have his more figurative work, it can refer to things we know the size of. The human body, for instance. Our minds can compare the size and proportion and suddenly, sbconsciously, we're comparing a painting to things otuside of it.

In these paintings, Johns has to do a tricky balancing act of working a surface, but also creating recognizable physical forms. He could make a decision to erase any idea of modeling the figure. But I don't feel like he has. He'll try to shadow a figure, but still keep the rest of the work on the surface, or in a confused place in between.

Look at the image below. Why are there shaded parts? They aren't random, since some of the dark spots seem to be where shadows usually fall.

Photo: MoMA

So why do I go on this long ramble about the subject of Johns' paintings and his signature? It was a theory I had looking around these recent drawings of his. Does Johns feel like he's approaching the end? Does he feel anxiety about whether these works are sufficiently "Jasper Johns"y? I don't know.

There's a drawing of Johns' from the '60s where he signed in the lower right and then made a big X to cross out his name. My theory is that somehow the specificity of the signatures on some of the newer works is related to the specific marks he once froze in time.

He may have once called authorship into question, hiding his enigmatic persona behind his canvas, using generic subjects like targets and maps, but now his work has lost its signature. His new work is not as distinctive as the "signature" work from the '60s.

When I look at the older paintings of Johns', I can't help but feel the beat of his brush hitting the canvas hundreds of times, each stroke marking a particular moment in time. A particular place. Does Johns now have to sign what he used to paint?