A Half-Century Later, Art Of Jasper Johns Still Feels New
More on the new show, now at the Kuntsmuseum.

The artist, who was born in 1930, used an encaustic technique, mixing pigment and liquid wax to create surfaces at once transparent and compact in their composition. In this period Mr. Johns also started incorporating real objects into his paintings. Household cutlery, rulers and cups become an integral part of works like “Device,” “Souvenir 2” and “Zone.” He was one of the first artists to do this, but unlike those who followed him, such as Jeff Koons, he is more interested in the creative tension between the objects and art than in the mass culture represented by the objects themselves.

Mr. Johns’s work has foreshadowed trends and techniques, such as monochromatic canvases, two-dimensional objects and colors and shapes borrowed from advertising, that are still being explored a generation later by today’s contemporary art stars. The monochromatic paintings in the show — all green or all white targets — still astound after half a century with their originality.

This is pretty much the relevant quote, for me. The article is only four paragraphs long, and you need a subscription to see the whole thing unless you get there directly through google news (which is how I got there).
You don’t see much about Johns online, or in magazines (well not as much as in the 70’s and 80’s anyways), and I think he is one of the most important, and influential, of the modernists.