False Flag? Brian Ramnarine's Johns bronze is just one of the works attributed to the artist that has led to court proceedings

Assistant to Jasper Johns charged with theft

The American artist's long-standing assistant has been charged with stealing 22 works, and selling them for $6.5m

Even in terms of contemporary art sales, Jasper Johns's works are pricey. The 83-year-old American pop artist creates only a few works each year, and when pieces come to market, the bids are high. A 1958 Flag painting was sold to hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen in 2010 for an estimated $110m, making it the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist.

Small wonder, then, that there have been accusations and even some successful legal actions against those attempting to sell works by or purported to be by the artist over the years.

Last autumn Brian Ramnarine, a New York foundry owner who had worked for Johns, was charged with selling a fake work cast from one of the artist's moulds. Now, Johns' long-standing assistant James Meyer has been charged with taking 22 unfinished works from the artist's studio, fabricating authentication certificates and selling the pieces via an unwitting New York gallery.

Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (1960)

51-year-old Meyer had been assisting Johns since the mid-1980s, while also pursuing a fine-art career of his own. Yet according to prosecutors, Meyer began to remove works from Johns's Connecticut studio at least as early as 2006, taking pieces from a file drawer he had been tasked with taking care of.

Meyer faked authentication certificates, claiming that Johns had gifted the works to his assistant, before selling them via an unnamed Manhattan gallery for a total of $6.5m. Of this, Meyer himself received $3.4 million. Bloomberg reports that Meyer insisted that each buyer kept the work private for eight years, perhaps in an attempt to cover up his crimes. Clearly, this wasn't precaution enough.

To read more about the case, go here. To learn more about Johns's life and work, do take a look at our pop art books. For an entirely legal close-up examination of the artist's work, do consider The Art Museum, the greatest collection of art ever assembled between two covers.

PopEdited by Mark Francis, with a survey by Hal Foster

Price AUD$89.95 Price CAD$99.95 Price £45.00 Price T75.00 Price USD$75.00

From the late 1950s to the late 1960s the word Pop described art, film, photography and architectural design which engaged with the new realities of mass production and the mass media. Unlike books which present Pop art in isolation, this is a comprehensive survey of Pop in all of its forms across America, Britain and Europe

In addition to the key artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, Sigmar Polke, Martial Raysse and many others the book includes works of photography and avant-garde film, as well as what the critic Reyner Banham defined as Pop architecture, ranging from Alison and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future to Archigram’s Walking City and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas

Editor Mark Francis was former Founding Director of the Andy Warhol Museum and editor of ‘Les Années Pop’ (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2001). Survey author Hal Foster is Professor of Art at Princeton University, author of The Return of the Real and editor of the bestselling The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture and Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics

Specifications:

Format: Hardback
Size: 290 × 250 mm (11 3/8 × 9 7/8 in)
Pages: 304 pp
Illustrations: 0 illustrations
ISBN: 9780714843636

Mark Francis is a London-based curator and writer. A director of Gagosian Gallery, he was formerly Chief Curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and its Founding Director. In 2001 he directed and edited the catalogue for the exhibition 'Les Années Pop', Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a former Senior Editor of Art in America. He is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) and Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985), and the author of Compulsive Beauty (1993) and The Return of the Real (1996).

"Modern art and design continues to fillet the movement once known as Pop, so Phaidon’s new monograph is a timely look back... Pop has it all, not just the iconic big-name images... Editor Mark Francis [...] has dug a little deeper and drawn together film, photography and even architecture."—Wallpaper*

"...What makes the book indispensable is the inclusion of documents in which the artists, critics and theorists speak for themselves."—Martin Coomer, Time Out

"If you're looking for last-minute Christmas presents for your art-loving friends, you could do a lot worse than this. Divided into three sections - the survey by Hal Foster, a gazetteer of works and a selection of contemporary documents - this book could replace a whole bookshelf in your art library... It's a formula that should ensure that this book is one of the essential reference works on the Pop-art era."—Mark Rappolt, Modern Painters

"The many strengths of this absorbing, eclectically detailed survey are concentrated most in the cultural historical networking that is achieved between image and text. What results is in part a luxurious and luxuriating immersion in the sheer visual gorgeousness of much Pop material, and in part a digest and directory of Pop's great works, sources and related texts - Pop's greatest hits, so to speak... Pop art ought never to be consigned to some ever-expanding repertoire of stylish retro-aesthetics. It is the cultural link between Surrealism and Postmodernism, and often made statements about the modern world that have yet to be improved, or updated."—Michael Bracewell, Art Monthly

"Phaidon's Themes and Movements series seeks to provide the late 20th-century art history books of the future."—Art Monthly