A framed painting by Jasper Johns entitled "False Start".

Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking. Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. His treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly. He is famous for incorporating such media as encaustic and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp, who was associated with the Dada movement. Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs. His breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the end, they had simply changed subjects.