20世纪70年代末，在艺术家的爆炸性流行艺术开始和一段抽象的时期之后，代表性的物体回到了Jasper Johns的工作中。在艺术家的话语和之前的学术研究的支持下，Jasper Johns是**个对他的后期绘画和作品进行全面研究的人。

菲奥娜多诺万帮助将对约翰斯有个人意义的图片进行背景化，并解释了更广泛的人文主义话语。读者们可以从塞尚、瓦尔德、毕加索等人的作品中获取并抽象出他对他的吸收，并发现约翰在他周围的环境中所发现的灵感。

多诺万通过几个关键的阶段和转折点的发展，不仅揭示了灵感和影响的潜台词，还揭示了约翰斯的同时代人、合作者的个人看法和困扰。约翰引人注目和经久不衰的好奇心在他的风格变化中无处不在，但他作品中的主题、动机和情绪的变化都是他非凡技能所支撑的。

这本书提供了一个难得的机会去欣赏和进一步理解一种令人难以理解的美丽却难以捉摸的作品。

Jasper Johns is one of the most important artists of our time. This book offers the first comprehensive study of his art since 1980, a period in which the artist has made some of his most moving and challenging work. Looking primarily at Johns’s paintings and works on paper, and drawing on conversations with the artist, Fiona Donovan provides the context for this later work and explores its visual and iconographic complexity. In the years 1980–2015, Johns’s imagery ranged from investigations of his own earlier subject matter and personal history to a much broader humanist discourse. Spiritual, moral and sexual themes run through his work, as well as ruminations on memory and mortality. Donovan also examines associations between poetry and Johns’s art as well as the artist’s absorption with appropriation and abstraction of images taken from such diverse sources as Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, Cézanne, Picasso, and the Vietnam War photographer Larry Burrows.

Johns’s abiding curiosity is reflected in his stylistic changes, and the shifting themes, motifs and moods of his work are all underpinned by his exceptional painterly skill and interest in process, as demonstrated in the magisterial works presented here, from ‘The Seasons’ and the ‘Catenary’ paintings to the more recent series, ‘Regrets’.

Jasper Johns: Pictures within Pictures provides a unique opportunity to view and further understand the compellingly beautiful and intriguing works by an artist who continues to be at the forefront of American art.