A cake replica of Johns’s $17.1 million 1959 False Start

SC artist and A. C. Moore alumnus Jasper Johns was born in Augusta on May 15, 1930. Johns’s parents lived in Allendale where there was no hospital.

After a boyhood in Allendale, Columbia, Batesburg–Leesville, and Sumter, where he graduated from high school, Johns spent three semesters with the art department at USC. He took his teachers’ advice and moved to NYC, where he was drafted into the Army.

The Army put Johns in Fort Jackson, and he taught art to fellow soldiers while he managed exhibitions of their work in the Columbia Museum of Art. In the early 50s, after his military stint, Johns moved back to NYC.

A 26” X 17” cake replica of Johns’s 1955 Flag In NYC, in 1955, he painted his first Flag, the white one which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His second Flag was the full red, white, and blue, and it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Johns had his first solo show at the Castelli Gallery in 1958, and MoMA bought three paintings from the show for its permanent collection. A fourth painting, the Flag in color, was bought by architect Philip Johnson and donated to the museum.

To celebrate Johns’s 75th birthday, a lecture on his work was given last Friday night on the top floor of Senate Plaza. I gave the slide–illustrated lecture and provided the guests with champagne and birthday cake. The cake was a large sweet replica of Johns’s False Start, painted in 1959.

Johns’s False Start sold at auction in 1988 for $17.1 million, a world record for a living artist. The painting was bought by S. I. Newhouse of Conde Nast, the publishers. More recently a painting changed hands in Los Angeles for a reported $40 million. But that was a private sale, not an auction, so False Start still holds the record.

Lillian’s, a cafe and bakery on Forest Drive behind The Happy Bookseller, put together the 26” X 17” cake and painted False Start in icing. Johns’s Flag in color went over another cake of the same size. Two 15” X 15” cakes were added to the collection, each covered with Green Target , a replica of another 1955 painting by Johns which hangs in MoMA.

False Start was carved up and eaten and carted off Friday night, and three cakes needed distribution to art lovers around Columbia. Flag went to the Carolina Childrens’ Home Saturday morning. One Green Target was on the food table at the Nurturing Center’s art auction that night in the back of the BLACKLION. The second Green Target was shared with a couple dozen residents in the Bomar Center at the SC Episcopal Home at Still Hopes.

Flag and Green Target will never be sold, always to hang in the MoMA. We at Senate Plaza knew we were eating $17.1 million dollars’ worth of art. The crowd at Carolina Children’s Home, the Nurturing Center, and Still Hopes were working on a hundred million dollars, at least.

Lillian’s did a wonderful and accurate job. If you need any such thing in creative cakes on a tight schedule, go to Lillian’s. After all the hassle, short–term requests, art replication, and scale of delivery, we did all right with our four cakes for $749.