Jasper Johns

In 1954 a young American painter named Jasper Johns destroyed most of his early work and started over with an image everyone already knew by heart, the Stars and Stripes. He painted the American flag flat, filling the whole canvas, in hot wax mixed with pigment and scraps of newspaper, so the surface is thick, worked and strange up close while the sign stays instantly readable from across the room.

That painting, simply called Flag, asked a question that shaped the next 50 years of art. Is this a flag, or a painting of a flag, or just paint. Johns went on to give targets, numbers and maps the same treatment, familiar public signs that he could not invent and did not need to.

With his friend Robert Rauschenberg he pulled American art away from the raw emotion of the Abstract Expressionists toward a cooler, sign-reading spirit that fed Pop and Minimalism. Now in his 90s and among the most expensive living artists, he still works, and one of his flag paintings hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it helped change what a painting could be.