“Without question, Jasper Johns is one of the greatest artists of our era.” This statement, written in the catalog foreward for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show “Jasper Johns: Gray,” comes directly from the Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, and was written jointly with James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, where the show originated. This is no faint praise indeed. And the Metropolitan Museum has not taken Mr. de Montebello’s claim lightly. “Jasper Johns: Gray,” a sumptuous presentation of 119 of the artist’s paintings, reliefs, drawings, prints, and sculptures made between 1959 and 2007, is the Metropolitan putting on its black tie, bowing down, and rolling out the carpet — gray instead of red — for an art world dignitary.

Jasper Johns was born in South Carolina in 1930 and moved to New York in 1949. He is, along with Rauschenberg and Warhol, a direct descendent of Duchamp and of Abstract Expressionism. Mr. Johns’s Neo-Dada art has always been reactionary. But almost all revolutionary ideas, if they take hold, eventually become state institutions. Mr. Johns, then, is a founding father, a king, a living legend; and “Gray” is no less than a coronation.

“Gray” is the Metropolitan lavishing as much reverence on a living artist as a museum such as the Met — an esteemed institution aware of requisite decorum — is capable. As with the Met’s recent show of Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” “Gray” celebrates and honors the ascendancy of American Postmodernism — and of Mr. Johns, who helped to make it all a reality. “Gray,” with its black marble floors and its white walls tastefully decorated with artworks colored midnight black, diamond white, and gray — colors that range from ghostly gray to snowy dusk-gray to slate, lead, and silvery gray — is so pristine, so stylish, so sleek and velvety smooth, that it goes down as easily as a walk through an Hermès store.

Like Rauschenberg, whom the artist befriended in 1954, Mr. Johns, working somewhere between painting and object, incises his pictures; and he collages things, images, and everyday objects — including newspapers, rulers, brooms, metal cans, and rope, as well as cast body parts — to his canvases. Mr. Johns made his mark on the art world in the 1950s, when he began making encaustic paintings of the American flag. “Using the design of the American flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it,” Mr. Johns has said. Well, there you go. The artist also quickly became famous for paintings depicting targets, maps of America, and stenciled letters, numbers, and words, as well as for his relief sculptures of the same subjects and his cast sculptures of human body parts, flashlights, light bulbs, and Ballantine Ale beer cans. Nearly everyone is aware of those thickly swathed, waxy red, white, and blue depictions of Old Glory, and of the red, yellow, and blue “Targets”; but viewers may be less familiar with the fact that Mr. Johns repeated nearly everything he did in color in shades of gray — a practice commonly referred to as grisaille.

A centuries-long tradition revolves around grisaille. It has been used as the first layer, or underpainting, of pictures, as well as for finished paintings on stained glass and the wings of altarpieces. Giotto used grisaille on the lower walls of the Scrovegni Chapel to imitate French Gothic portal sculpture. Numerous artists, such as the Le Nain brothers, Alessandro Magnasco, Corot, and Picasso, whose “Guernica” is a grisaille, have been drawn to painting with grays or to working strictly tonally. And Cubism’s color — almost as if controlled in a laboratory — was analyzed, reined in, pared down, and distilled by Braque and Picasso to a range of grays, just as space and form in Cubism were pared down — distilled to planes, lines, and simple geometry.

Mr. Johns, however, is not concerned with traditional uses of grisaille. He wants gray, according to the catalog, to create ambiguity, to obfuscate, neutralize, veil, and conceal. At the beginning of the show, the wall text states that Mr. Johns works in gray because gray is a color “that highlights most powerfully some of Johns’ central concerns, among them draining his works of the emotions and associations sparked by colors.” In this sense, he is certainly successful. Mr. Johns’s painted grays — without a hint of light — swallow up nearly everything that comes in contact with the works. This includes poetic association or emotional response. The pictures, sculptures, and objects become mute things that deaden interaction.

The Met’s show has brought together an enormous amount of the artist’s gray works. The exhibition includes Mr. Johns’s black, white, and gray painted maps, numbers, letters, and flags, the painted targets that look like eyes, the shimmering grid pictures of stenciled letters, numbers, and words, the pictures and sculptures of coat hangers, cast metal sculptures, and the molten sculpted-relief flags, targets, numbers, and letterforms. Arranged chronologically, the show also has a range of the artist’s abstract crosshatching pictures from the 1970s and ’80s; and it ends with the most recent works, the “Catenary” series, begun in 1997. The “Catenary” series, in which the main event of the painting is often a curved rope smile hanging in front of a gray field, or a series of curves that resemble a painting of Veronica’s veil, refers to the catena, a Latin term, used in engineering, for the rope or chain that hangs freely from two fixed points. In these pictures, the wall text rightly informs us, “gray is a chalkboard wiped clean.”

In “Gray,” color is not so much distilled as it is absent. Don’t expect the beautiful, lush, emotionally rich range of grays found in Corot’s twinkling landscapes, in Picasso and Braque’s shimmering Cubist still lifes, or in Magnasco’s peculiar pictures of the Inquisition, in which whipping bright lines electrify passages of darkness. Mr. Johns is not interested, seemingly, in gray as color; he uses gray to negate and nullify.

Although gray takes on many guises in the exhibition, we are treated across the board to a rather mute and limited palette and exhibition. In Mr. Johns’s hands, gray is reflective or icy. It is ghostly, smoky, or hairy. Gray is scumbled, worked up into a frenzy; or it is sluggish, a primeval sludge. Generally, though, Mr. Johns’s gray, no matter what face it puts on, is as dense and unresponsive as cement; gray shuts down as soundly as the door of an iron tomb.

In what almost can be described as Mr. Johns performing a feat of magical misdirection, his art closes down and deadens; pushes us away, rather than bringing us closer. We are made aware not of Mr. Johns’s artworks’ substance (if, in fact, they have any), but of their banal and meaningless gray surfaces — the brushstrokes and materials out of which they are made, as well as the objects that are attached to the artworks, or to which the artworks refer.

In Mr. Johns’s art we are made aware of the means by which it was constructed — where it began and how it ended; but we are allowed little, if anything, in between. An engagement with the artwork on any other grounds is a dead end, a rather useless endeavor. The poet and playwright Samuel Beckett correctly observed about Mr. Johns’s work (although he was voicing approval), “No matter which way you turn you always come up against a stone wall.” I guess this show’s message, then, is “Hail to the master of the stone wall.” I prefer art, however, that opens doors, rather than shuts them.

Until May 4 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).