THE MIND'S EYE.

The artist Jasper Johns lives alone in a large gray fieldstone house in northwestern Connecticut. Built in the nineteenth century, the house stands on a hillside overlooking a hundred and thirty acres of meadows and woods and a distant lake, and from the outside it has a staid and formal aspect. Inside, Johns has opened it up and cleared away most of the period decor, leaving a suite of sparsely furnished, uncluttered spaces, where he has placed works by artists he admires. In the living room, a small oil painting by Cezanne, a version of the famous image of a male "Bather with Outstretched Arms," hangs over the fireplace. Twelve framed Cezanne drawings rest on shelves in a nearby bookcase. A large freestanding sculpture made of bent and twisted auto-body parts, by Johns's contemporary John Chamberlain, occupies one corner of the room, and a stack of Andy Warhol's Heinz cartons serves as a side table for one of the two pale-gray armchairs. On a long table against the far wall, five Jomon pots (rare, prehistoric Japanese ceramics) group companionably at the far end. "I always wanted five of them," Johns says. "And now I have five."

Johns, at seventy-six, is an imposing presence. Just over six feet tall, with thinning white hair and considerable bulk through the chest and shoulders, he pro-jects a concentrated self-assurance that is less armored than it used to be. Twice before, during the forty years we have known each other, I have proposed writing about him for this magazine; both times he said he would think about it, and then, a week or so later, he tactfully declined. Recently I asked him again, and this time he said that he was will-ing to try, with the understanding "that it might be a failure." I knew what he meant. Johns has never been an easy interview. Although he makes a serious effort to answer most questions about his work, attempts to probe into meaning or interpretation annoy him. He prefers to talk about how a work was made, not why, and his answers tend to be literal, succinct, and often opaque. This does not encourage personal revelations. As the art critic Vivien Raynor once wrote, in Artnews, "He has a remoteness that, while very amiable, makes all questions sound vaguely coarse and irrelevant."

Johns had suggested I meet him that morning in his painting studio, in a converted coach barn about a hundred yards from the house. The studio, which occupies half the ground floor, is a big, open room with a high ceiling and immense sliding doors at either end. There are several worktables, with paints and art supplies neatly laid out. On the wall just to the right of the entrance is a very small, very crude oil sketch by Cezanne of a reclining nude woman. To the left of this door, on the wall and clustered on two shelves, is a miscellany of disparate objects that Johns likes, or that people have sent him because they think he would like them: two versions of Marcel Duchamp's self-portrait in profile; a geode with water trapped inside it; a tiny Joseph Cornell box; four shadow-box frames containing, respectively, a sea horse, a praying mantis, a large beetle, and a tarantula; some children's drawings; a micro-teapot made from a single penny; several novelty toys, two of which feature an outhouse with a small boy inside who pees on you when you open the door--Johns demonstrated one of them for me.

Four recent paintings hung on the back wall. All four were painted in a pattern of irregular abstract shapes that echoed the "flagstone" motif Johns had used extensively in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies. Three of them were in muted colors, and the fourth was predominantly gray, a color whose tonal complexities have figured prominently in Johns's work throughout his career. This one's title, he said, was "Beckett." When I asked why, he told about working with Samuel Beckett on a book, in 1976, with writings by Beckett and images by Johns--flagstone images, and also the tight clusters of short, diagonal "crosshatch" brushstrokes that he was using in many of his pictures then. "Sam was looking at some etchings I had made," Johns said. "He held them up very close to his face--he had bad eyesight--and then he said, 'I'll tell you what I see. Here'--pointing to the crosshatching--'I see you try all these paths in different directions, but, no matter where you go, you come up against this wall.' " I asked him whether Beckett's remark, with its ring of comic futility, might have had to do more with Beckett than with Johns. "Don't you think that all of our interpretations of other people's work sound like us?" he said, laughing. "That's what's interesting--you get to see yourself another way."

Later, we walked over to the main house for lunch. On weekdays, Johns has lunch with his staff--his studio assistant, James Meyer; John Lund, who runs a fully equipped print studio that occupies the other half of the building's ground floor; Sarah Taggart, his longtime secretary and personal assistant; and Taggart's aide, Lynn Kearcher. On this Sunday in May, the staff was absent, but Johns's chef had prepared lunch, which was precisely laid out on a side table, on antique Japanese plates--seafood salad, corn salad, asparagus, wild rice, fresh bread, and sauteed morels, gathered that morning from a spot that Johns pointed out to me, under an oak tree, where they appear at this time every year. There were three paintings in the dining room, each with a wall to itself. A small, metallic image of the American flag (the subject of Johns's 1954 breakthrough work) hung over the fireplace--it is actually a cast, in silver, of a collage that Johns made for Robert Rauschenberg in the early nineteen-sixties. One of Cy Twombly's large "blackboard" paintings, with white scribbled lines on a black background, occupied a side wall, and a 1963 silk-screen painting by Rauschenberg, called "Cove," was on the wall facing the Johns flag.

During lunch, I started to ask him about what had struck me, in the studio, as a return to his "abstract period" of the nineteen-seventies, but he cut me short. "What are you talking about?" he said. I said I was referring to the flagstone and the crosshatch motifs. "If you consider that abstraction," Johns said. "Those stupid marks." Most people do, I said. "Well, I don't know that I think of my other work as representational," he said. "This is an idea that isn't mine. If I meet someone I don't know, someone slightly naive, and they ask me what I do, I say I'm a painter, and if they ask what kind of a painter, I say an abstract painter. It's a way to get out of saying anything else. Or I just say I'm a modern artist. But I don't know what kind of an artist I am."

Jasper Johns's first solo exhibition, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958, established him as an artist of great originality and singular importance. Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art's director, came in, stayed for an hour, and bought three paintings for the museum, a virtually unprecedented vote of confidence for a previously unknown painter who was still in his twenties.