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Jasper Johns b. 1930 Montez Singing signed and dated 1989 encaustic and sand on canvas 75 1/4 by 50 1/4 in. 191.1 by 127.6 cm. Provenance Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC#320) Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1990 Exhibited New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Summer Selections, June - August 1990 Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, Twentieth-Century Collection, August 1990 - February 1991 New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Jasper Johns, February-March 1991 New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Cologne, Museum Ludwig; Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, October 1996 - August 1997, cat. no. 224, fig. no. 16, pp. 30, 357 and 360, illustrated three times, once in color Literature Jo Ann Lewis, "Jasper Johns, Personally Speaking", The Washington Post, May 16, 1990, p. F1, illustrated Susan Brundage, ed., Jasper Johns: 35 Years: Leo Castelli, New York, 1991, n.p., illustrated Anna Landi, "Showstopper", Artnews, November 2000, p. 184, illustrated in color (installation view) Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, New York, 1994, p. 71, pl. 226, illustrated twice, once in color As early as 1984, Jasper Johns had begun to make drawings of a human, female head in which highly stylized eyes, lips and a nose were deconstructed into singular, isolated motifs on a, generally, vertical-rectangular support. These idiosyncratic, almost comedic marks, were consistently positioned on the margins of the paper or canvas by the artist, so that they can be seen as a specific vocabulary of Signs which, both in nexus and in contrast, become a pattern fuelled by personal and aesthetic influences. One of the eyes would occupy the extreme top left corner, the other would be found towards the lower-central right edge. The lips, reminiscent of mountain peaks or crests of waves, occupy the right of the lower edge of the support, often 'seated' on an internal frame or parapet. The 'landscape' of this visage, in turn, allows the canvas or paper to become a kind of 'rectang