Market dispatch·New York
400 Jasper Johns Works on Paper: The Hidden Pop Collection Behind a New MoMA Documentary
A new documentary premiering at MoMA tells the story of John and Kimiko Powers, who bought Pop Art straight from the studio in the early 1960s and kept their collection intact, including the largest holding of Jasper Johns works on paper anywhere.
One recent morning, 90-year-old Kimiko Powers received a visitor in a New York hotel suite, fresh from a 14-hour flight from Tokyo, for the premiere of a new documentary at the Museum of Modern Art. The Powers: A Life in Art, directed by Tyler Oliver, tells the story of the Pop Art collection she built with her late husband John, starting in the early 1960s when the movement barely had a name.
John Powers was president of the textbook publisher Prentice Hall when art-book publisher Harry Abrams urged him to collect contemporary art. Abrams sent abstract paintings by Morris Louis, Mark Rothko and Friedel Dzubas to Powers's office, where they sat in a closet for months. Abrams then hung them in the company cafeteria, and the response from employees woke Powers to what contemporary art could communicate. From there, Abrams took the couple to artists' studios, including Andy Warhol's, where the artist was still working alone at a very early stage of his career.
The couple's instincts were sharp. In 1965, alerted by dealer Harry Diamond, John Powers went to the apartment of architect and philanthropist Armand Bartos and bought Warhol's oversized Two Hundred Campbell's Soup Cans from 1962 on the spot. Warhol went on to make 25 portraits of Kimiko, 12 of which remain in the collection. Three of their major works by Jasper Johns, including a 1965 Map and a 1968 White Alphabet, appeared in the artist's two-venue Mind/Mirror retrospective at the Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2021-22.
Unlike many major American Pop collections, which have been sold or donated in recent decades, the Powers collection remains with the family, largely out of public view in the Carbondale, Colorado, home the couple built after leaving New York. Its public part sits at the Powers Art Center, established by Kimiko and her Ryobi Foundation after John's death in 1999 at 83. Some 400 Jasper Johns works on paper reside there, easily the largest such holding anywhere. Dealer and author Michael Findlay, who appears in the film, calls it the best collection of its kind to have survived intact.
