'Untitled' (1996) was completed when Jasper Johns was entering his fifth decade as an artist. In this drawing, his interest in both personal and collective art historical memory is explored; to stand before this work is to probe archeologically back through forty years of his art. 'Untitled' (1996) is, indeed, a spectral fragment of a painting completed in the previous year, 'Untitled' (1992-95), recounting and slightly altering in charcoal the motifs and composition of the lower right 3/4 of the painting. As Kirk Varnedoe notes in his introduction to 'Jasper Johns: A Retrospective,' the resonances of 'Untitled' (1996) echo throughout the entirety of John’s oeuvre: Johns conceived of the painting on which it is based as the replacement for an earlier work that hung in his home for ten years; though taller and more square, the underlying structure of the new picture essentially mirrors (thus reverses) three sections of that earlier, 1984 composition. In another doubling backwards in time, the horizontal panels labeled red-yellow-blue, the hand- and arm-prints, and the “scraped” half-circle motifs at the outer edges of the 1984 painting themselves reiterate motifs Johns had used in the early 1960s, in works such as 'Diver' and 'Periscope (Hart Crane).' The half-circles in those paintings are linked to 'Device Circle' of 1959, which in turn refers backward yet again, to Johns’ earliest images of targets, from 1955.
