Setting the Record Straight - painter William H. Johnson, various galleries

Art in America, April, 1999 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Combining scores of previously unknown works with several startling biographical revelations, a current exhibition reinterprets the personal and professional history of painter William H. Johnson.

Imagine discovering that the "postman" Roulin and Madame Ginoux, the "Arlesienne" cafe proprietress, had done more than humor van Gogh by sitting for portraits, and in fact had purchased his paintings and offered enduring support. Imagine learning, too, that good brother Theo had been negligent, even self-serving, in his shepherding of Vincent's professional interests. Then you will have some idea of the historical revisionism which propels the pointedly titled exhibition "William H. Johnson: Truth Be Told."

The show is tantamount to a crusade by its organizer, Los Angeles art dealer Steve Turner, whose legal training surfaces in the unabashedly adversarial tone of the enterprise. Commercial interests can't be completely discounted here, but then there are easier ways to turn a profit than to engage in four years of research and underwrite a traveling exhibition. Turner has assembled 54 Johnson works, mainly paintings along with some drawings and prints, nearly all previously unknown. With a few exceptions, the works had belonged to descendants of Johnson's Danish in-laws and others in Scandinavia who had acquired them directly from the artist. Using the details of provenance and dogged archival digging, Turner aims to topple two mainstays of Johnson historiography: that his works were saved from destruction by the timely intervention of the Harmon Foundation (whose mandate from the 1920s to the 1960s included the support of African-American artists), and that the artist's late, "folkloric" style is an expression of his belated but wholehearted embrace of his racial identity, an embrace which demoted his European sojourn to a sort of warm-up to the "essential" Johnson.

A South Carolina native, Johnson (1901-1970) received a traditional art education at New York's National Academy of Design before embarking on the life of an expatriate in France in 1926. There he shed academic decorum in favor of a tempestuous and heavily impastoed manner strongly influenced by European expressionism. Landscapes and still lifes predominated. He married the weaver Holcha Krake in 1930, and the couple spent the next eight years in rural Denmark and Norway, taking trips across Europe and to Tunisia. After Johnson and his wife moved to New York in 1938 to escape the rise of Nazism, his focus shifted to the figure and to themes from African-American life, whether recalled from his southern childhood or directly observed in Harlem. The new style was radically fiat, patterned, naive, and was dosed with both gentle humor and religious sentiment. Johnson returned alone to Scandinavia after the war (Holcha died in 1944), but the onset of a degenerative brain disease in 1947 forced his repatriation and institutionalization. The art in his possession was placed in a warehouse, and he languished in a state hospital on Long Island for 22 years until his death.

Over time, Johnson has become a doubly exemplary figure in African-American art history. He is, on the one hand, emblematic for journeying to the more racially tolerant Europe and mastering its prestigious artistic language and, on the other, deeply admired for returning to his roots. The latter aspect was proudly foregrounded by a major retrospective organized by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art in 1991-92 [see A.i.A., Oct. '92]. The show and its thoroughgoing catalogue by Richard J. Powell were called "Homecoming."

By contrast, "Truth Be Told" is structured to underscore the importance of the Scandinavian years, though the show opens with three paintings likely datable to Johnson's time in France (1928-29) and closes with 16 pieces from the New York period. Many paintings feature the Danish port town of Kerteminde, where the Johnsons lived. Those from the very early '30s are rendered in a rich, cursive, occasionally fussy impasto that is indebted to van Gogh, Vlaminck, Soutine and Kokoschka. The 1932 Tunisian trip, during which Johnson studied ceramics, led to a reduction in the linear play of paint and a more material surface built up with trowel-like sweeps of a palette knife--an extravagant expenditure of paint by an artist working on burlap to economize.

The change brought both solemnity and vitality to Johnson's sometimes pinched-looking still lifes. In the landscapes, the newer approach can be seen in the remarkable Harbor, Kerteminde (ca. 1933-34), where the buildings lining the shore are rendered as a blocky mosaic that seems to anticipate the abstractions of Nicolas de Stall, and in a pair of paintings executed in Norway, the fresh and modest Two Red Barns (ca. 1935) and Norwegian Landscape (ca. 1935-37), whose simplified Bentonesque ribbons of paint possess a cartoonlike bounce.

The ensemble adds up to a "dealer's choice," a selection which was determined by what Turner found in private hands, and which is marked by both highlights and indifferent works. One suspects, however, that the exhibition's four-state tour is really intended to stimulate awareness--and indignation--about Johnson's final years. In his catalogue essay, Turner takes on the Harmon Foundation, which was granted custody of the hospitalized painter's works in 1956 (and donated most of them to the National Museum of American Art 11 years later). He argues that foundation director Mary Beattie Brady and Johnson's court-appointed guardian overstated the danger faced by the works in storage so that the foundation would gain unsupervised control. The ensuing unsystematic dispersal of some pieces, the fact that many ended up in Brady's possession and the pitiable attempts of Johnson's Danish in-laws to recover works that were rightfully theirs all make for a sorry tale of gross neglect and condescension. Two years ago Johnson's American family launched its own efforts to recover a portion of the work [see "Front Page," Dec. '97]. Their lawsuit was dismissed in June, but they am reported to be planning an appeal.