Jasper Johns Assistant Charged with Stealing the Artist’s Work

Hans Namuth, Center for Creative Photography Copyright 1991 Hans Namuth Estate Jasper Johns, center, with his long-time assistant, James Meyer, right, and an unknown associate in 1989. Mr. Meyer has been charged with stealing and selling at least 22 works from his employer.

The long-time assistant of the Pop art master Jasper Johns was arrested on charges that he stole at least 22 works from his employer and sold them through an unnamed New York gallery for $6.5 million, falsely telling the dealer and buyers that Mr. Johns had given them to him as a present and that they would be in the official compendium of the artist’s work known as the catalogue raisonné.

The assistant, James Meyer, was alleged to have pocketed $3.4 million. Arraigned in a Hartford, Conn., courtroom, Mr. Meyer pleaded not guilty to charges of transporting goods and wire fraud, and was released on an unsecured $250,000 bond after his arrest on Wednesday. An assistant at Mr. Johns’s studio in Sharon said the artist had no comment on Mr. Meyer.

In the 27 years that Mr. Meyer worked for the artist, he answered the artist’s phone, stretched his canvases, bought his paintbrushes and even drew lines on his canvases.

During the time they sat together in Manhattan, St. Maarten and most recently in Sharon, Conn., Mr. Johns mentored his apprentice, teaching him how to construct a work of art, how to trace and re-use his drawings and how to make an encaustic painting using hot wax. “Most important,” Mr. Meyer once said, was that “Jasper has taught me to think about what I’m making before I make it.”

An artist himself, Mr. Meyer, 51, has talked about how lucky he was to find himself working with one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century. In an unpublished interview from the 1990s with the writer Matthew Rose, Mr. Meyer recounted how he made a cold call to Mr. John’s studio in 1984, when he was 22, and painting knockoffs of works by Van Gogh and Matisse at $6 an hour to hang on the walls of Beefsteak Charlie’s.

With his rèsumè and slides of his work in hand, Mr. Meyer said, “I put on a suit, too, and went over to Johns’ Houston Street studio - this large old bank building - tapped on the door.” He left some work behind.

He didn’t get through the front entrance, but when he returned the next day to retrieve his work, Mr. Johns himself opened the door and invited him in for coffee.

“Come back tomorrow and we’ll take it day by day,” Mr. Meyer remembered Mr. Johns saying. He said that he sometimes drew lines on Mr. Johns’ canvases, which the artist would later erase and redraw.

Mr. Johns, now 83, is probably best known for his collage and encaustic paintings of the American flag, one of which hangs in the fourth floor gallery of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Last year, the foundry owner, Brian Ramnarine, who created a wax cast of the mold for his famous 1960 metallic collage “Flag,” secretly used the artist’s original mold to make a bronze sculpture that he attributed to Mr. Johns and tried to sell for $11 million.