Face With Watch

Jasper Johns’ Late-Career Meditation on Time and Identity

Few artists have interrogated the boundaries between object and representation as relentlessly as Jasper Johns. Face With Watch (1996) emerges from a period when Johns, then in his late 60s, was distilling decades of exploration into works that balanced formal rigor with quiet introspection. This lithograph—part of a series created at Universal Limited Art Editions—layers a ghostly profile with the circular motif of a wristwatch, a symbol that had recurred in his work since the 1950s. Unlike the bold, encrusted surfaces of his early flags and targets, here Johns employs a restrained palette of grays and blacks, allowing the interplay of positive and negative space to dominate.

The watch face, rendered with precise crosshatching, becomes both a literal timekeeper and a metaphorical device. As the Museum of Modern Art has noted in its analysis of Johns’ later works, his recurring use of clocks and watches reflects a preoccupation with mortality and the passage of time—a theme that grows more pronounced in his post-1990 output. Yet Face With Watch resists easy narrative. The profile’s ambiguity (is it a self-portrait? a generic cipher?) and the watch’s blank face (its hands omitted) transform the composition into a meditation on absence as much as presence. The work’s spare elegance belies its conceptual depth, inviting viewers to project their own interpretations onto its carefully calibrated voids.

The Neo-Dada Legacy: Johns’ Dialogue with Duchamp and Rauschenberg

By 1996, Jasper Johns had long since transcended his initial association with Neo-Dada, yet Face With Watch retains the movement’s core impulse: the collapsing of high art and everyday signifiers. The wristwatch, a mundane object elevated to artistic subject, echoes Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, while the work’s layered printing techniques nod to Robert Rauschenberg’s combinatory approach. What distinguishes Johns’ treatment is his fastidious craftsmanship. Unlike the chaotic assemblages of his 1950s contemporaries, this lithograph achieves its effects through meticulous control—each hatch mark and tonal gradient the result of painstaking plate preparation.

The genius of Face With Watch lies in its tension between precision and ambiguity. Johns gives us a clock without time, a face without identity—inviting us to confront what we bring to the act of looking.

This period marked a return to introspection after the more overtly political works of the 1980s. As documented in the Art Story’s timeline of Johns’ career, the mid-1990s saw him revisiting earlier motifs—flags, targets, body parts—but stripping them of their earlier bravura. The watch, here, is less a symbol of modern anxiety (as in his 1960s paintings) than a quiet marker of personal time. Its placement over the profile suggests a literal "face with watch," yet the composition’s symmetry and the absence of hands transform it into something more universal: a memento mori for the late 20th century.

The Lithographer’s Craft: How Face With Watch Was Made

Layered Printing and Tactical Erasure

Johns created this lithograph at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, New York, a workshop renowned for its collaboration with artists like Robert Motherwell and James Rosenquist. The process began with a stone or aluminum plate onto which Johns drew with greasy crayons and tusche. What appears as spontaneous crosshatching in the final print is, in fact, the result of multiple states: the artist would proof the image, then selectively erase or add marks before reinking. The watch’s circular form required particular precision—its edges were likely achieved by masking areas of the plate to maintain crisp borders amid the textured field.

Subtractive Composition

The profile’s ethereal quality comes from Johns’ subtractive approach. Rather than building up layers of ink, he worked by removing material—scrubbing the stone with abrasives to create the pale gray "face." This technique, known as grainage, leaves a delicate tooth in the paper that catches light differently than the smooth black of the watch. The contrast between these surfaces is more pronounced in person, where the print’s tactile qualities become evident. At 30×40 cm, the scale allows viewers to discern these micro-variations, which reproduce poorly in digital images.

Displaying Face With Watch: A Curator’s Guide

The print’s monochromatic palette and geometric clarity make it remarkably versatile, but its impact depends on thoughtful placement. In contemporary interiors, it commands attention when hung at eye level in a narrow hallway or above a console table, where its vertical orientation can elongate the space. The 30×40 cm dimensions suit intimate settings: consider a study with dark walls (charcoal or navy) to amplify the contrast between the watch’s black and the profile’s gray. For minimalist spaces, float it solo on a white wall with at least 18 inches of breathing room on either side. Avoid direct sunlight, which can accelerate the subtle fading of lithographic inks over decades. Pairing it with a single floodlight (3000K color temperature) will emphasize the texture of the paper without causing damage.

More Works by Jasper Johns

Explore other framed prints from Johns’ six-decade career, spanning his iconic flags to later introspective works.

Jasper Johns

Flag On Orange Field

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Jasper Johns

White Target

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Jasper Johns

Untitled Ulae S13

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Jasper Johns

Scott Fagan Record

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