Born in Florence, South Carolina, at the beginning of the modern century, William H. Johnson (1901-1970), was a virtuoso skilled in various media and techniques. With work that spanned decades, continents, and genres, he is a seminal figure in modern American art. 

Historically, Johnson’s work has been under-examined in the modern art literature, but awareness and interest in this artist has been on the rise in recent years. President Obama created a buzz when he selected four of Johnson’s works from the Smithsonian’s collections—the most by any one artist—to decorate the White House. Now, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) has joined with Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, to bring Johnson’s work to communities across the nation. This fall marks the opening and release of William H. Johnson: An American Modern, a traveling exhibition and scholarly book of the same name. 

(Above) William H. Johnson, Self Portrait (c. 1923-1926). Collection Smithsonian American Art Museum.  All other images courtesy Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD.artes fine arts magazine  

Forty years ago, in 1971, after receiving a historic donation of over 1000 pieces of Johnson’s art from the William Harmon Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum published the first book on Johnson, cataloging their collection of his work. Although Johnson had reached a level of fame and exhibited widely in the 1930s and early 1940s, his career came to abrupt halt in 1945 with the onset of severe medical issues, and his subsequent institutionalization. This book re-introduced Johnson’s art to the world through black and white reproductions, along with a biography of the artist and a brief analysis. Twenty years later, scholar Richard J. Powell published his groundbreaking monograph, Homecoming: the Art and Life of William H. Johnson. His biographical-critical overview of Johnson’s life and work was grounded in extensive research and brought Johnson to the fore—inspiring multiple exhibitions, articles, a children’s book, and new analysis of his art. 

Today, 20 years after Powell published Homecoming, a new book from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and Morgan State University introduces a range of scholarly debate currently surrounding the artist. Thanks to the foundation of knowledge laid by Powell and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, William H. Johnson: An American Modern is able to present Johnson in a new light and analyzes important themes and patterns in his work. The book also examines Johnson’s work on a different scale: This volume considers just 20 paintings from Morgan State’s holdings. The Morgan collection encapsulates the pivotal stages in Johnson’s career as a modernist painter, including post-impressionist and expressionist works reminiscent of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Soutine, and the vernacular paintings in which he articulates his specific, unforgettable voice as an artist. 

These works were acquired in 1967 by James E. Lewis, then the director of the Museum of Art at Morgan State. The terms of the Harmon Foundation donation to the Smithsonian enabled Mr. Lewis, along with representatives from a handful of other historically black colleges and universities, to select works by Johnson for their institutions’ permanent collections. Lewis was the first to arrive and had first choice of the works available. His keen eye aided him in selecting these specific 20 pieces, which together offer a concise overview of Johnson’s life and work. 

This new book presents Johnson as a quintessential modern painter firmly planted in the pantheon of great American artists. In this new text, some of the world’s premier scholars of William H. Johnson and African American art history examine the artist and his modern artistic genius in fresh new ways, including his relationship with one of his earliest patrons, the Harmon Foundation; the critical role played by scholars at the nation’s historically black colleges and universities; the context of Johnson’s experiences living in Harlem and his deep southern roots; and Johnson as a trailblazer in the genres of still life and landscape painting. 

Among the essays presented in his volume are two new works by Richard Powell, grounded in his lifetime of studying Johnson and his work: “Trembling Vistas, Primal Youth: William H. Johnson’s Expressionism,” and “Devotion and Disrepute: William H. Johnson’s Florence, South Carolina, Paintings, circa 1944.” Viewed as discreet analyses, each tells the story of a moment of change in Johnson’s style. Read in tandem, however, they tell a story of profound artistic growth and maturation. “Trembling Vistas” explores Johnson’s hesitant departure from his academic training into the realm of European modernism, and “Devotion and Disrepute” examines Johnson’s “vertiginous turn” away from the visual language of Expressionism to the neo-primitive vernacular employed in the final period of his career (William H. Johnson: An American Modern, 92). 

For many critics, the decisive shift in Johnson’s style discussed in Powell’s second essay constituted “mutin[y] against predictable techniques” (91). Powell acknowledges that the use of this vernacular was a significant risk for Johnson, as it “contradicted what many people expected from an academically trained, European associated artist” (90); however, Powell’s analysis of Johnson’s oeuvre throughout the two essays supports Johnson’s own explanation of his new style, which he voiced in a 1946 interview with the New York Amsterdam News: “It was not a change but a development.” 

Powell muses over the significance of this statement in his second essay (93): “Describing his French and Scandinavian landscapes as developmental works prior to the largely figurative paintings of the 1940s is intriguing, suggesting that the lessons learned as an Expressionist charted the path to becoming a neo-primitive.” 

His reference to “the lessons learned” during Johnson’s Expressionist days indirectly points to his earlier essay in this volume (“Trembling Vistas”), in which he presents Johnson’s first ten years abroad as a period of continued art education (albeit in the modernist tradition). In “Trembling Vistas,” Powell documents Johnson’s initially cautious “experiments in various forms of modernism” and attempts to “work out a style of [his] own” (29, 27). His cogent analysis reveals that over a period of one decade, Johnson’s work become progressively bolder, his paint thicker, and his colors more brightly hued as he absorbed various artistic influences and immersed himself deeper into the art and social scene of European Expressionism. 

Although Johnson eventually abandons his thick impasto technique and solid Expressionist approach in favor of an “emphatic[ally] two-dimensional” style, the impact of other lessons learned in his Expressionist period is evident in Johnson’s vernacular work (90). Of particular note, says Powell, is Johnson’s early epiphany that “to truly represent the world around them, the artist must become one with his/her subject” (24). Throughout his career, Johnson focuses on his individual subjective experience of his subjects, rather than trying to capture objective reality. He articulated this objective to a Scandinavian journalist in 1932, saying, “my aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually.” In doing so, Powell claims, Johnson is “articulat[ing] in line, shape, and hue the social and psychological dimensions of peoples and places and their interconnections”—a focus which he began to develop in his early days in Europe but which is seen most clearly in his later work (25). 

In his 1946 interview with the New York Amsterdam News, Johnson asserts that, “In all my years of painting, I have had only one absorbing and inspired idea…– to give, in simple and stark form – the story of the Negro as he has existed.” While Johnson’s achievement of this goal is readily apparent in his later works, his early works seemed to deviate from this idea. However, Powell argues in “Trembling Vistas” that Johnson’s interest in “primitiveness and tradition” is evident even in his early years as a professional painter. For one image, inspired by a brief trip home to the American South, Johnson expresses his hope “‘to abstract’ and to put onto canvas that ‘something’ which the surrounding ‘little Negro boys and girls’ possessed” in a letter written to a sponsor in 1930, eight years before he begins exploring African American subject matter in depth (28). In addition, Johnson’s depictions of rural Scandinavian folk culture served as an important foundation for his later exploration of black folk life in the U.S. Although Johnson ultimately—in Powell’s analysis—came to find his voice as “an authentic community commentator,” highlighting the importance of the African American story his paintings told, his “attraction to the primitive was neither race-based nor specific to non-Western cultural traditions,” as evidenced by his earlier work in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (91, 31). 

According to Powell, “Johnson’s was a blackness that refused to proselytize for its inclusion in high society; that wasn’t about to apologize for its coarse honesty and intrusive, antithetical visibility; that stood, or tumbled, in its rightful universality alongside other races and ethnicities…” (95). In William H. Johnson: An American Modern, the “rightful universality” of Johnson’s work is celebrated as it is examined in the context of other modern painters of “other races and ethnicities.” The essays in this collection explore the ways in which Johnson marshaled the ideas and techniques of European modernism to create a highly personal visual language and capture authentically and respectfully the American story with which he was most familiar—that of the African American community. Powell eloquently articulates the evolution of Johnson’s singular style and the continuity of his philosophical vision from his early days as a bohemian Expressionist in Europe to his final paintings which offer a haunting and insightful commentary on rural Southern African American life. This new book brings to life Johnson’s conscious combination of formal training, international influences, and personal experiences to pare his style down to the very simplest, starkest terms. He achieves this without sacrificing the strength of his message or the profound emotional quality he could instill in his works, forever marking him as a truly American modern. 

By Robin Meyer, Contributing Writer 

William H. Johnson: An American Modern, by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and Morgan State University, published by University of Washington Press. Includes essays from Richard J. Powell, Leslie King-Hammond, David Driskell and Lowery Stokes Sims. The exhibition of the same name began a national tour September 10, 2011at the Gari Melchers Home and Studio in Fredericksburg, VA., and will tour the country through 2014. Visit www.sites.si.edu for a detailed itinerary.