MOMA: "One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag,” Johns has said of
this work, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the
materials to begin it.” Those materials included three canvases that he
mounted on plywood, strips of newspaper, and encaustic paint—a mixture
of pigment and molten wax that has formed a surface of lumps and smears.
The newspaper scraps visible beneath the stripes and forty-eight stars
lend this icon historical specificity."