The False Start is one of the popular oil paintings of Jasper
Johns and was made on canvas 170.8 centimeters long and 137.2 centimeters wide. The colorful painting has always impressed the people since the time it was released. The magnificent use of varied kinds of colors in painting is most impressive. Jasper Johns completed the painting in 1959.Who is Jasper Johns? Born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930, Jasper Johns grew up in Allendale, South Carolina. He studied at the University of South Carolina for three semesters before moved Parson School of Design.
Together with Robert Rauschenberg, Johns is widely acknowledged as one of the most important American painters in the postwar era.
In 1960 John’s dealer, Leo Castelli, had sold False Start for $3,150 to collector Robert Scull, who had made his money in the taxicab business. He then sold False Start in the six figure range to François de Menil, the son of John and Dominique de Menil, heirs to the Schlumberger oil fortune. Castelli figured giving the booming market that the painting might sell for as much as $10 million, although had been estimated to fetch only $8 million tom $9 million.
SI Newhouse bought Jasper John’s painting False Start for $17 million in 1988, at the top of an overhead art market.
In early 1990s, at the bottom of the market, SI Newhouse started to sell what Castelli calls “some very good paintings.”
In Oct 12, 2006, the painting was sold to the Kenneth C. Griffin, for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist.
False Start manages to be both clotted and expansive, a field of interlocking patches and passages of red, yellow, and blue with orange and gray, each of which is named throughout the compositions. Such as it is, this composition is an allover affair with no hierarchy of parts, in good, second generation abstract expressionist.
One of the Most Expensive Paintings: False Start
