Grey Alphabets - Jasper Johns, 1956
From the Art Institute of Chicago:
The painting Gray Alphabets (1956) takes as its subject the building blocks of the written word, which are incorporated into a collaged newspaper substructure. Indeed, newspaper figures prominently throughout Johns’s production, as the artist felt it provided a rough texture and activated the surface in a way resonant with the artist Robert Rauschenberg’s observation that “the first stroke in the painting had its own unique position in a gray map of words.” Gray Alphabets also plays with the graying of the black-on-white printed elements when seen from the distance required to take in the full canvas. It is not only Johns’s first alphabet painting but also the first in which the word “gray” appears in the title.