In stating that Jasper Johns’ work “is no more a flag than Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows is the Wiltshire countryside”, your correspondent (Letters, 26 September) seems confused about both Johns’ flag paintings and Constable’s landscapes. A flag is a piece of cloth to which a certain pattern, in certain colours, has been applied. Johns’ early flag paintings correspond to that description. You could cut one off its stretcher, attach it to a stick and have a flag to wave. Of course it is also a painting of a flag. Johns became so famous because he had given a radically fresh twist to the relationship of art to reality. Constable was misunderstood in his own time because his landscapes looked so much like nature that they appeared not to be art. Rejected in England, Constable’s innovations were however seized upon by French painters. He is a founding father of modern art and recognisably an ancestor of Johns.
Simon Casimir Wilson
London
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