Allegory of Music by Filippino Lippi. The "Allegory of Music" is a popular theme in painting; in this example, Lippi uses symbols popular during the High Renaissance, many of which refer to Greek mythology.

Allegory is a device used to present an idea, principle or meaning, which can be presented in literary form, such as a poem or novel, in musical form, such as composition or lyric, or in visual form, such as in painting or drawing. It is also seen in scriptural passage. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric; a rhetorical allegory is a demonstrative form of representation conveying meaning other than the words that are spoken.

As a literary device, an allegory in its most general sense is an extended metaphor. As an artistic device, an allegory is a visual symbolic representation. An example of a simple visual allegory is the image of the grim reaper. Viewers understand that the image of the grim reaper is a symbolic representation of death.

Etymology[link]

First attested in English 1382, the word allegory comes from Latin allegoria, the latinisation of the Greek ἀλληγορία (allegoria), "veiled language, figurative",^[1] from ἄλλος (allos), "another, different"^[2] + ἀγορεύω (agoreuo), "to harangue, to speak in the assembly"^[3] and that from ἀγορά (agora), "assembly".^[4]

Types[link]

Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory," ranging from what he termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queene, to the more private allegories of modern paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive" allegory are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or other abstraction; the allegory has been selected first, and the details merely flesh it out.

Many ancient religions are based on an astrologic allegories, that is, allegories of the movement of the Sun and the Moon as seen from the Earth. Examples include the cult of Horus/Isis.

The classical era[link]

In classical literature two of the best-known allegories are the cave in Plato's Republic (Book VII) and the story of the stomach and its members in the speech of Menenius Agrippa (Livy ii. 32). In Late Antiquity Martianus Capella organized all the information a fifth-century upper-class male needed to know into an allegory of the wedding of Mercury and Philologia, with the seven liberal arts as guests; Capella's allegory was widely read through the Middle Ages.

Other early allegories are found in the Hebrew Bible, for instance in the extended metaphor in Psalm 80 of the Vine, which is Israel^[5] and Ezekiel 16 and 17.^[6]

The medieval era[link]

Allegory of arithmetic, by Laurent de La Hyre, ca 1650

Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as the facts of surface appearances. Thus, the bull Unam Sanctam (1302) presents themes of the unity of Christendom with the pope as its head in which the allegorical details of the metaphors are adduced as facts on which is based a demonstration with the vocabulary of logic: "Therefore of this one and only Church there is one body and one head—not two heads as if it were a monster... If, then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care of Peter and his successors, they necessarily confess that they are not of the sheep of Christ" (complete text).

In the late 15th century, the enigmatic Hypnerotomachia, with its elaborate woodcut illustrations, shows the influence of themed pageants and masques on contemporary allegorical representation, as humanist dialectic conveyed them.

The denial of medieval allegory as found in the 11th-century works of Hugh of St Victor and Edward Topsell's Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (London, 1607, 1653) and its replacement in the study of nature with methods of categorization and mathematics by such figures as naturalist John Ray and the astronomer Galileo is thought to mark the beginnings of early modern science.^[7]

The modern era[link]

Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the World Wars, in spite of J. R. R. Tolkien's emphatic statement in the introduction to the second edition, "It is neither allegorical nor topical.... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." Where some requirements of "realism", in its flexible meanings, are set aside, allegory can come more strongly to the surface, as in the work of Bertold Brecht on one hand, or on the other in science fiction and fantasy, where an element of universal application and allegorical overtones are common, as with The Chronicles of Narnia.

Examples by genre[link]

Not every resonant work of modern fiction is an allegory. Arthur Miller's The Crucible, for instance, is character-driven historical drama with contemporary relevance, but is not an allegory in spite of its parallels with McCarthyism, linking the hunt for communists in the 1940s and 1950s to the hunt for witches in the late 17th century. L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is plot-driven fantasy narrative in an extended fable with talking animals and broadly-sketched characters. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is another example of a work sometimes seen as allegorical yet, as the author explained, is not - rather it is an example of what he referred to as applicability.

Art[link]

Some elaborate and successful specimens of allegory are to be found in the following works, arranged in approximate chronological order:

• Ambrogio Lorenzetti – "Good Government in the City" and "Bad Government in the City"
• Sandro Botticelli – La Primavera (Allegory of Spring)
• Albrecht Dürer – Melencolia I
• Bronzino – Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
• Artemisia Gentileschi – Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting; Allegory of Inclination
• The English School's – "Allegory of Queen Elizabeth" painted circa 1610.
• Jan Vermeer – The Allegory of Painting
• Lady Justice.^[8] – Such visual representations have raised the question why so many allegories in the history of art, representing male gendered realities, are of female sex.^[9]
• Graydon Parrish – The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy

• 

  Titian's Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence, with three human heads symbolising age and the triple-headed beast (dog, lion, wolf) standing for prudence.

• 

  Jan Vermeer's work, The Allegory of Painting.

• 

  The English School's Allegory of Queen Elizabeth with Father Time at her right and Death looking over her left shoulder. Two cherubs are removing the weighty crown from her tired head.

Literature[link]

Classical literature

• Aesop – Fables
• Plato – The Republic ("Plato's allegory of the cave")
• Plato – Phaedrus (Chariot Allegory)
• Euripides – The Trojan Women
• Qu Yuan – Encountering Trouble
• Book of Revelation (for allegory in Christian theology, see typology (theology)
• Martianus Capella – De nuptiis philologiæ et Mercurii

Mediaeval literature

• Prudentius – Psychomachia
• Christine de Pizan – The Book of the City of Ladies
• William Langland – Piers Plowman
• Pearl
• Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy
• Everyman

Modern literature

• Edmund Spenser – The Faerie Queene
• Edwin Abbott Abbott – Flatland
• Joseph Addison – Vision of Mirza
• Antoine De Saint-Exupery – The Little Prince
• Jorge Luis Borges – "The Library of Babel" and "The Babylon Lottery"
• Peter S. Beagle – The Last Unicorn
• John Bunyan – Pilgrim's Progress
• William M. Burwell – White Acre vs. Black Acre
• Albert Camus – The Plague, The Stranger, and Myth of Sisyphus
• Wu Cheng'en — The Journey to the West
• J. M. Coetzee – Waiting for the Barbarians
• Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol
• William Faulkner – A Rose for Emily (Emily symbolizes the decline of the Old South)
• William Golding – Lord of the Flies
• Daniel Handler – A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Roger Hargreaves - Mr.Happy
• Nathaniel Hawthorne – "The Great Carbuncle", "Young Goodman Brown"
• E. T. A. Hoffmann – Princess Brambilla
• John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany
• C. S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia (most notably in the book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)
• David Lindsay – A Voyage to Arcturus
• Jack London- "A Piece of Steak", short story about youth vs. old age
• George MacDonald – Phantastes
• Naguib Mahfouz – Children of Gebelawi
• Bernard Malamud – The Natural
• Cormac McCarthy – The Road
• Herman Melville – The Confidence-Man
• Alan Moore – V for Vendetta
• Hualing Nieh – Mulberry and Peach
• George Orwell – Animal Farm
• Edgar Allan Poe – "The Masque of the Red Death" (though Poe did not believe in allegory, this story is generally assumed to be one)^[11]
• Theodore Francis Powys – Mr. Weston's Good Wine
• Philip Pullman – His Dark Materials
• Jose Saramago – Blindness
• Anna Sewell – Black Beauty
• John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men
• John Steinbeck – The Pearl
• Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels (political allegory)
• Koushun Takami – Battle Royale
• Rex Warner – The Aerodrome
• Mohsin Hamid – The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Plays

• August Wilson – Fences (play) (Troy's fence is "designed" to keep the grim reaper away)

Film[link]

• James Cameron's Avatar, Native American Extermination for riches e.g. gold, mahogany, etc.
• Fritz Lang's Metropolis
• Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal
• El Topo
• Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, the Cold War
• The Matrix
• Dawn of the Dead
• The Virgin Suicides
• District 9, Apartheid
• Gojira
• Cannibal Holocaust, sensationalism
• Foodland (film)
• Ana's Playground^[12]
• The Wall (film)
• Planet of the Apes (1968 film), racism, creationism, evolution, animal rights, anti-nuclear politics, McCarthyism, and socio-economic stratification.
• Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Vietnam War, torture, Catholicism, jingoism, Mutual assured destruction.
• The Dark Knight, The War on Terror
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, The Holocaust
• Pandorum, the degradation of the human condition in Works and Days and Paradise Lost. As well as The Divine Comedy
• The Descendants

Television[link]

• The Twilight Zone (varied themes)
• Star Trek all series, (varied themes, though frequently addressed the issues of prejudice and racism)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5, Episode 2: "Darmok"
• The Prisoner
• Lost
• Fringe

Comics[link]

• Various X-Men comics (mutants as an allegory for various social and racial minorities)
• The manga Hanako and the Teller of Allegory calls a story given form from peoples' belief in it an allegory

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Allegories

• Allegory in the Middle Ages
• Allegory in Renaissance literature
• Allegorical sculpture
• Cultural depictions of Philip II of Spain
• Literary technique
• Plot device
• Roman à clef
• Semiotics
• Theagenes of Rhegium

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Frye, Northrop (1957) Anatomy of Criticism.
• Foucault, Michel (1966) The Order of Things.

External links[link]

• Brief definition of Allegory
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Allegory in Literary history
• Electronic Antiquity, Richard Levis, "Allegory and the Eclogues" Roman definitions of allegoria and interpreting Vergil's Eclogues.

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (May 2010)

Murray Attaway was the lead singer and guitarist for the Marietta, Georgia jangle pop band Guadalcanal Diary. After the band's breakup, Attaway recorded one solo album, titled In Thrall, which was released in 1993.^[1] Attaway also had the track "Allegory" featured on DGC Rarities, Vol. 1.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Guadalcanal Diary website

This article about a United States guitarist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This article about a United States singer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.

Life[link]

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia. He completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother.^[1] Recounting this period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in." He began drawing when he was three and has continued doing art ever since.^[2]

Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters.^[3] He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949.^[3] In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.^[3]

In 1954, after returning to New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long term lovers.^[4][5][6] In the same period he was strongly influenced by the gay couple Merce Cunningham (a choreographer) and John Cage (a composer).^[7][8] Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Rauschenberg's studio.^[3] Castelli gave him his first solo show. It was here that Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased four works from his exhibition.^[2] In 1963, Johns and Cage founded Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, now known as Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City.

Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut and the Island of Saint Martin.^[9] He first began visiting St. Martin in the late 1960s and bought the property here in 1972. The architect Philip Johnson is the principal designer of his home, a long, white, rectangular structure divided into three distinct sections.^[10]

Work[link]

Johns is best known for his painting Flag (1954–55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture.^{[citation needed]} Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' 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.

Johns' 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. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure painted surface could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could suffice – for example, in Andy Warhol's silkscreens, or in Robert Irwin's illuminated ambient works.

Abstract Expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning subscribed to the concept of a macho "artist hero," and their paintings are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature on canvas. In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols. Some have interpreted this as a rejection of the hallowed individualism of the Abstract Expressionists. Their works also imply symbols existing outside of any referential context. Johns' Flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.

Prints[link]

Since 1960 Johns has worked closely with Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc (ULAE) in a variety of printmaking techniques to investigate and develop existing compositions.^[11] Initially, lithography suited Johns and enabled him to create print versions of iconic depiction of flags, maps, and targets that filled his paintings. In 1971, Johns became the first artist at ULAE to use the handfed offset lithographic press, resulting in Decoy - an image realized in printmaking before it was made in drawing or painting. However, apart from the Lead Reliefs series of 1969, he has concentrated his efforts on lithography at Gemini G.E.L.^[12] In 1976, Johns partnered with writer Samuel Beckett to create Foirades/Fizzles; the book includes 33 etchings, which revisit an earlier work by Johns and five text fragments by Beckett. He has also worked with Atelier Crommelynck in Paris, in association with Petersburg Press of London and New York; and Simca Print Artists in New York.^[13]

Commissions[link]

In 1946, architect Philip Johnson, a friend, commissioned Johns to make a piece for what is now the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.^[14] After presiding over the theatre’s lobby for 35 years, Numbers (1964), an enormous 9-foot-by-7-foot grid of numerals, was supposed to be sold by the center for a reported $15m. Art historians consider Numbers a historically important work in part because it is the largest of the artist's numbers motifs and the only one where each unit is on a separate stretcher, fashioned from a material called Sculpmetal, which was chosen by the artist for its durability.^[15] Responding to widespread criticism, the board of Lincoln Center had to drop its selling plans.^[16]

Collections[link]

In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought Johns' White Flag. While the Met would not disclose how much was paid, "experts estimate [the painting's] value at more than $20 million."^[17] The National Gallery of Art acquired about 1,700 of Johns' proofs in 2007. This made the Gallery home to the largest number of Johns' works held by a single institution. The exhibition showed works from many points in Johns' career, including recent proofs of his prints. ^[18] The Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, has several of his pieces in their permanent collection.

Recognition[link]

Johns was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.^[19] In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. On February 15, 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, becoming the first painter or sculptor to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom since Alexander Calder in 1977.

Art market[link]

Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year. His large scale paintings are much favored by collectors and because of their rarity, it is known that Johns' works are extremely difficult to acquire. His works from the mid to late 1950s, typically viewed as his period of rebellion against Abstract Expressionism, remain his most sought after.^[20] Skate’s Art Market Research (Skate Press, Ltd.), a New York based advisory firm servicing private and institutional investors in the art market, has ranked Jasper Johns as the 30th most valuable artist.^[21] The firm’s index of the 1,000 most valuable works of art sold at auction – Skate’s Top 1000 – contains 7 works by Johns.

Already in 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art spent $1 million for Three Flags (1958), then the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist.^[22] In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC) bought Johns' False Start (1959) from David Geffen^[23] for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist.^[24]

Between 1957 and 1999, Johns had sold his work through Leo Castelli.^[25] Since 2000, he has been represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, and in the spring 2008, a ten-year retrospective of Johns' drawings was mounted there.

Other work[link]

In popular culture[link]

• In "Mom and Pop Art", a 1999 episode of the animated television series The Simpsons, Johns guest stars as himself.

References[link]

Notes

Bibliography

• Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974) ISBN 0-87982-007-1

Further reading

• Bernstein, Roberta. Jasper Johns' Paintings and Sculptures, 1954–1974: "The Changing Focus of the Eye.". Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.
• Bernstein, Roberta; Tone, Lilian; Johns, Jasper and Varnedoe, Kirk. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, The Museum of Modern Art, 2006.
• Castleman, Riva. Japser Johns: A Print Retrospetive. The Museum of Modern Art 1986.
• Crichton, Michael. Jasper Johns, Whitney/Abrams, 1977 (out of print).
• Johns, Jasper; Varnedoe, Kirk; Hollevoet, Christel; and Frank, Robert. Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, The Museum of Modern Art, 2002 (out of print).
• Kozloff, Max. Jasper Johns, Abrams, 1972. (out of print)
• Krauss, Rosalind E. and Knight, Christopher. "Split decisions: Jasper Johns in retrospect" Artforum, September 1996. Findarticles.com
• Orton, Fred. Figuring Jasper Johns, Reaktion Books, 1994.
• Pearlman, Debra. Where Is Jasper Johns? (Adventures in Art), Prestel Publishing, 2006.
• Rosenberg, Harold. "Jasper Johns: Things the Mind Already Knows". Vogue, 1964.
• Shapiro, David. Jasper Johns Drawings 1954-1984. Abrams 1984 (out of print).
• Steinberg, Leo. Jasper Johns. New York: George Wittenborn, 1963.
• Tomkins, Calvin. Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Artworld of our time. Doubleday. 1980.
• Weiss, Jeffrey. Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965, Yale University Press, 2007.
• Yau, John. A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2008.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jasper Johns

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jasper Johns

• Jasper Johns in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler collection
• Jasper Johns artwork at Brooke Alexander Gallery
• Jasper Johns at the Matthew Marks Gallery
• "The work of Jasper Johns at the National Gallery" Curator Jeffery Weiss discusses the Johns exhibition at the National Gallery. Charlie Rose show April 2007.
• VAGA – To clear rights to reproduce works by Johns
• Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
• States and Variations: Prints by Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art
• Jasper Johns (born 1930) Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Jasper Johns at the Museum of Modern Art
• Jasper Johns bio at artchive.com
• Flag at the Museum of Modern Art
• White Flag at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Lifetime Honors – National Medal of Arts