NEW HAVEN, CONN.- Following on the recent publication of the long-awaited, monumental catalogue raisonné of his paintings and sculpture, the artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is being celebrated this fall with a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London (opening September 23, 2017), which will travel to The Broad, in Los Angeles (from February 10 to May 13, 2018).

In the midst of this exciting moment for the artist and all who care about his work, Yale University Press, in association with the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, will release a spectacular single-volume book that presents the most comprehensive, definitive study of Jasper Johns’s work ever published.

The book is Jasper Johns: Redo an Eye (publication date: October 3, 2017), by renowned Johns expert Roberta Bernstein. The book, not to be confused with the catalogue of the exhibition, is a standalone volume, the definitive distillation of the important scholarship that Bernstein conducted over many years: the culmination of her lifelong investigation of one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century. Adapted from her groundbreaking catalogue raisonné of the paintings and sculpture, it contains nearly 400 illustrations, including 374 in color. Richly illustrated with comparative visuals, it provides the reader access to the plethora of Johns’s own influences, and firmly grounds his work in an art historical context

In her introduction to Jasper Johns: Redo an Eye, Bernstein says that she considers “the most interesting and illuminating way to study an artist's work is to look for the threads that run through it as well as the disruptions that introduce new ideas. Johns’s art yields an extraordinary richness of intellectual, psychological, and visual engagement when studied this way.”

Spanning over sixty years of Johns’s prolific career, the book explores the synergy between continuity and change in the development of the artist’s work through 2014. The text is enlivened by the voluminous insight Bernstein has gained over decades of knowing the artist, and she incorporates Johns’s own unique manner of talking about his art through interviews and public statements. Each chapter focuses on a specific time period and its prevailing themes in Johns’s paintings and sculptures.

The book’s compelling subtitle (the phrase appears, camouflaged, in Johns’s 1966 painting Passage II), indicating an “eye” and an exhortation to “redo” it, neatly summarizes a persistent aspect of Johns’s art. His works—at turns ambiguous, ironic, and poignant—simultaneously engage the visual senses and challenge habits of perception. In keeping with this theme, Jasper Johns: Redo an Eye is a thoughtful celebration of how Johns’s art inspires the viewer to resist ingrained habits of seeing, in turn affecting the way one experiences and interacts with the world: the hallmark of an extraordinary artist.

Roberta Bernstein has an unparalleled vantage point on the work of Jasper Johns, and she is uniquely qualified to bring clarity to the engaging, vital, and contemporary themes that Johns revisits over the course of his long career. She is author and director of Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture, and professor emeritus of art history at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Over her fifty-year career, Bernstein has worked with Johns in his studio, written extensively on his work, curated exhibitions, and developed a friendship based on engaging with his artwork. She is co-curator of a major Johns exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London (September 23, 2017 to Dec. 10, 2017), which will travel to The Broad, in Los Angeles (February 10, 2018 through May 13, 2018).