"History and Biography": The words are clearly legible under the thick, red encaustic, the primitive medium of melted wax and pigment that Johns used instead of oil paint. Johns, the great sphinx of Modernism, won't tell you what they mean. "A painting," he once said, "should be looked at the same way we look at a radiator." (But how exactly do we look at a radiator?) His explanation for why he uses targets and maps and flags is the same as George Mallory's for climbing Mount Everest: because they're there. He told art critic David Sylvester, "I am interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality." OK, what was the world up to in 1955? Johns was drafted into the Army in the spring of 1951 and was stationed first at Fort Jackson, S.C., and then, from December 1952 until May 1953, in Sendai, Japan. In a smart catalog essay, minimalist sculptor and critic Robert Morris observes, "The military environment is characterized by the impersonal, the anonymous, and the insistently repetitious. Targets, flags, numbers, and maps form a ubiquitous set of iconic signs within the closed military environment." For Morris, Johns is the painter of Cold War militarism. So much for history. What about biography?