Johns is 91 years old. Ever since the mid-1950s, when he painted an American flag just as it was, his pensive and poker-faced art has had a reputation (not entirely unearned) for self-containment. For withdrawal.

And in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” the two-part retrospective of his life’s work currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he is being hailed again as brilliant …

… but stoic. A grandmaster of American art, all the grander for his reticence.

I love his reserve, though I get why some people find his art frosty.

Many of his paintings can come across, at first, as a closed circuit of intellectual puzzles.

But I want to show you my favorite Johns painting, one that first appears as impersonal as any other — and which, slowly, delivers a roundhouse of passion and pain.

Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. He is well known for his depictions of the American flag and other US-related topics. Johns’s works regularly sell for millions of dollars at sale and auction, including a reported $110 million sale in 2010. At multiple times works by Johns have held the title of most paid for a work by a living artist.

Johns has received many honors throughout his career, including the National Medal of Arts in 1990 and Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007. In 2018, The New York Times called him the United States’ “foremost living artist.”