For more than thirty years Jasper Johns has been making art that teases viewers with the willful obscurity of its content, while offering rich visual pleasures with the beauty of its form, color, and surface. In 1955 he painted his first Flags, which, with the Target and Numbers that soon followed, were to become his most famous work. His transformation of such common place images into art helped to shatter the dominance of Abstract Expressionism and to make possible the later innovations of Pop art and Minimalism. Johns`s acclaimed recent work, which is well represented in this book, combines his continuing fascination with ready-made images with an exciting new use of illusionistic painting.