Van Gogh •
Artist Biographies
•
William H Johnson
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William H Johnson |
| Birth Year : |
1901 |
| Death Year : |
1970 |
| Country : |
US |
William H. Johnson was born into a working-class black family in
Florence, South Carolina. He moved to New York City at the
age of seventeen and lived there with his uncle. He was educated in the academic and formal traditions of art at the
National Academy of Design, which he entered at the age of twenty. In 1926, Johnson went to Paris, where he not only painted
but also began his studies of modernist art. He soon moved to the south of France, where he began rapidly developing his
own style, a realist-Impressionism strongly influenced by
Van Gogh
and
Cezanne. One of the most powerful influences on Johnson during that
period was the work of Soutine, with its use of distorted forms to express emotion and mood. In 1930 Johnson married a
Danish textile artist and moved to Kerteminde, Denmark, a small fishing village, where he worked productively. He and his
wife also traveled throughout Norway and North Africa, studying traditional crafts and art in both cultures. Those travels
strongly influenced Johnson's later style: he found in indigenous works an expressive boldness and naiveté of form upon
the qualities of which he would base so much of his mature works.
In 1933, with the gathering threat of war in Europe, Johnson returned to New York and encountered another important
influence: the intensity and excitement of life in Harlem. It was in the late 1930's and 1940's, bringing together
his interests in modernism, primitive art, and African-American life, that Johnson found a mature style. His best
paintings characteristically place flattened figures, in a limited and high-keyed palette, on abstracted ground,
depicting scenes of daily life with great personality and intensity. "Café" (1939-1940), for example, depicts a nattily
dressed Harlem couple, showing Johnson's interest in a favorite modernist subject: cafe life. The strikingly
colored "Going to Church" (1940-41) reverts to the rural settings of Johnson's childhood.
US
"The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism."
