Although this monograph begins by probing modernism's surfaces and subjects, its public and private meanings, in order to establish Jasper Johns's importance as the modern allegorical artist in the years after abstract expressionism, it is not an essay that presumes to offer an instant interpretation. Rather, it constructs a Johns whose work is introduced and explained in three chapters, each of which addresses a specific picture or sculpture. These in-depth studies place individual works in their social context as well as in Johns's oeuvre, and the author's aim is to get to terms with - and find terms for - a difficult and elusive body of work by one of the most important artists of the 20th century.