Who painted the 1954-55 painting 'Flag'?

Jasper Johns painted Flag in 1954–55.

Flag is one of Johns’s best-known works and is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Rather than depicting an invented symbol, Johns painted the familiar design of the United States flag, forcing viewers to consider whether they were looking at an object, an image, or a painting. That ambiguity became central to his art.

The work combines encaustic, oil paint, and newsprint collage on fabric mounted to plywood. The wax-based encaustic medium gives the surface a thick, uneven texture, while fragments of newsprint remain visible beneath the stripes. The flag has 13 stripes and 48 stars, matching the U.S. flag before Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union.

Johns said the idea came from a dream about the American flag in 1954. Although the work is often discussed alongside Pop Art because it uses an everyday national symbol, Johns is more broadly associated with Neo-Dada and postwar American art. It is not a painting by Warhol, Lichtenstein, or Rauschenberg.