In 1954, a 24-year-old Jasper Johns destroyed every piece of art he owned to force himself into original territory. This episode follows his life from a turbulent childhood in the rural South, where the only paintings he saw were his step-grandmother’s landscapes, through Korean War service in Japan, a bookstore job in New York, and the intense romantic and artistic partnership with Robert Rauschenberg on Pearl Street that set the stage for his breakthrough.

We look at why painting a flag, a target, or the alphabet was radical in an era dominated by abstract expressionism, how his encaustic beeswax technique preserved every brushstroke and newspaper scrap, and why MoMA’s trustees were too afraid of McCarthy-era politics to buy his flag until architect Philip Johnson quietly bought it and donated it years later. The conversation covers the Savarin coffee can cast in bronze, his 180-plus lithograph editions, collaborations with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and the market trajectory that took a 1958 flag painting to a reported 110 million dollars.

• How Leo Castelli’s 1957 studio visit led to a nearly sold-out 1958 debut
• Why Johns chose things the mind already knows to remove his own ego from the canvas
• What the bronze coffee can full of brushes says about perception and illusion
• How lithography let him iterate endlessly on flags, targets, and numbers
• His plan to turn his 170-acre Connecticut estate into a retreat for artists