Weiss and his team at the National Gallery are on to something. With a limited set of mechanically impersonal means—a target shape, a compasslike device, body prints, and stenciled color names—Johns has created an amazing range of images. But when we arrive at Johns' extraordinary drawing Diver, the sense of tragedy is unavoidable. We seem to be on deck, or rather the drawing is a wooden deck, with the footprints of a previous diver imprinted on the top of the sheet. This enormous picture seems more carved than drawn. The outstretched arms have hands at both ends, like some strange divinity of pure grasping or reaching. Maybe in a few years, when Johns' prohibitions have waned and it no longer seems reactionary to look for cultural or personal meanings in abstract art, we will be able to speak openly about the deep emotional impact of pictures like Diver. It makes me think of Gauguin's sculptures, with their deliberate attempt to cut to something more primal in human experience. Maybe Japan, which has always been important to Johns, helped him enter this spiritual domain. Johns returned to Japan in 1964, where he made a series of pared-down prints and drawings, in one of which he prints four injunctions in four adjacent boxes: "cut, tear, scrape, erase."