On 14 June 1777, the fledgling USA officially adopted its national flag. To celebrate the holiday, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas is unveiling a particularly patriotic recent acquisition—Jasper John’s Flag (1983). Johns painted his first of many American flags between 1954 and 1955 after he claimed that the symbol came to him in a dream. Since then, the artist has used the same motif in a multitude of works and various mediums. The flag he uses always has 48 stars and 13 stripes, since Alaska and Hawaii were not granted statehood until 1959. The museum bought their Flag for $36m last November at Sotheby’s, New York, and it joins other recent additions to the permanent collection, two sculptures and two paintings by the American artist Louise Bourgeois.
