The most celebrated image of the American flag is Emanuel Leutze’s melodramatically heroic image of Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, painted 55 years after the event. It shows an earlier version of the Stars and Stripes known as the Betsy Ross Flag after the Philadelphia seamstress who, according to legend, designed it, arranging in a circle the 13 stars representing the colonies that fought in the war for independence.
It was not until 1818 that Congress passed the last of several Flag Resolutions, fixing the number of stripes at 13 and the number of stars as always matching the number of states, with any new stars added on 4 July. From 1777 to 1960 there were 27 versions of the US banner.
It was though Johns’s pictures, however neutral, that alerted other artists to the potency of the flag and led to a flurry of subsequent imagery. In 1979-80, for example, Jean-Michel Basquiat made Untitled (Flag), a deconstructed and crumpled variant in which the stars have been transposed on to the stripes but start falling off like mutineers walking off the plank.
In 1990 David Hammons made a real-life African American Flag in which he swapped the red, white and blue for the black, red, and green of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African Flag first seen in 1920. One version was sold in 2017 for more than $2 million and, for some reason, the Black Lives Matter movement has missed an obvious trick by not adopting it. And in 2018 Robert Longo produced Untitled (Torn Flag), a none too subtle comment on the state of the nation showing a shredded and peeling Stars and Stripes.
The most controversial version, however, came in 1988, when an artist called Dread Scott laid an American flag on the floor of the Art Institute of Chicago and asked visitors to stand on it while writing in a book mounted above it their response to the question “What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?”.
The ensuing row was enough to draw in the then President, George Bush Sr (“A disgrace . . . I don’t approve of it at all”), and provoke the Senate to vote 97-0 into passing a law against “displaying the flag of the United States on the floor or ground”. During the debate Bob Dole came up with the line: “I don’t know much about art but I know desecration when I see it.” Scott enjoyed the furore and later went on to a further provocation by burning the flag on the steps of the US Capitol.