Johns was born in South Carolina in 1930. After moving to New York in the early 1950s (he now splits his time between Connecticut and St. Martin),  Johns emerged on the scene in 1958 with an auspicious gallery show. The Museum of Modern Art purchased three pieces—as much a coup then for an artist’s debut as it would be today. His early works—lush paintings of maps, American flags, letters, numbers and targets—eventually found their way into major museum collections. Those textured paintings showed their Abstract Expressionist roots, but in subject they veered toward Pop Art and minimalism. In his celebration of the common object, and with his painting technique, Johns was instrumental in helping shape the latter two genres.

Yet, despite the omnipresence of Johns’s work in major museum collections, his presence in Chicago until now has been scant.

“In the past, the Art Institute hasn’t done a great job of representing Jasper Johns, either in exhibitions or in our collection,” admits James Rondeau, the museum’s curator of contemporary art. The Art Institute owned just a few pieces. “We weren’t completely without, but we had no major statement,” he says.

That began to change in 2001, when Douglas Druick, a curator in the prints and drawings department, purchased an untitled drawing for the museum from Johns’s most recent “Catenary” series. (Johns, who works in series, based these pieces on the curve that appears in a rope or cable when suspended from two points.)

Johns is not the sort of artist who draws as a way to prepare for a larger painting but, Rondeau says, this time it was different. “[Johns said], ‘I don’t know if I’m going to make this painting, but if I do, I’ll call you,’?” Rondeau recalls. The call came a few years later, and the museum acquired Near the Lagoon (pictured, previous page)in 2004.

With that major piece now in the collection—an elegant gray-on-gray painting that Johns made to signal the end of his “Catenary” series—Rondeau and Druick began to make plans for the museum’s first Johns exhibition. The idea to pull together all of Johns’s gray works seemed a viable theme—all of his recognizable subjects (the flags, maps, targets and numerals) had, wat one time or another, been executed in gray.

So, we had to ask: What color will the exhibition walls be painted? “We had a lot of conversations about this,” Rondeau says, and the result is a warm shade of gray. “Balboa Mist,” he says, to be exact.

“Jasper Johns: Gray” runs November 3 through January 6, 2008, at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S Michigan Ave at Adams St (312-443-3600, artic.edu/aic).