The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s massive new jazz age exhibition opening on Sunday is a comprehensive survey of New York’s homegrown movement of Black music, literature and visual art.
“The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” will showcase paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography and more, and highlights the contemporaneous connections between Harlem and Europe. It includes paintings of the African diaspora by Matisse, Munch, and Picasso, and underscores the ways that travel to London, Paris, and Scandinavia opened considerable opportunities for Black Americans in the arts after World War I
William H. Johnson, a stunning yet largely forgotten New York City painter featured in the exhibition, embodies its trans-Atlantic focus. He moved back and forth between New York and Europe, and won awards in the 1920s but ultimately fell on hard times after failing to achieve major commercial success. Johnson later died in a Long Island mental institution in 1970, and the fate of his large body of work was left unclear, according to Virginia Mecklenburg, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or SAAM, which loaned a number of works to the Met's exhibit.
Photo of William Henry Johnson's "Jitterbugs."
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
The story of Johnson's life and how his art ended up at SAAM is a fascinating look into 20th century Black art and how it was sustained. The evolution of his style also illustrates how Black modernism developed over the same period.
Johnson was born in South Carolina and moved to New York City as a teenager in 1918, where he enrolled in the prestigious National Academy of Design. His early works represent the school's textbook style of figure drawing and portraiture.
But he soon broke the mold and moved to France in the mid-1920s, where he married a Danish artist. His style underwent a dramatic evolution that ventured into French Impressionism and German-style Expressionism before it became something uniquely African American.
Photo of William Henry Johnson's "Portrait of a Man," ca. 1923-1926.
Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum
Richard Powell, professor of art and art history at Duke University who authored a 1991 biography of Johnson, says the many evolutions of Johnson’s style imbued him with a singular talent.
“In a fairly brief career, Johnson produced an amazing array of artworks that walk us through modernism in world art with a focus on Black culture,” Powell said. “That's what makes them so amazing.”
“If you're looking at a William H. Johnson of the late 1930s, early 1940s, you're seeing something incredibly quilt-like, with big chunks of colors and figures that are distorted in a kind of a jazzy way,” Powell said. “And if you're looking at a Johnson produced after World War II, you're looking at something that you might think is folk art.”
Photo of William Henry Johnson's "Street in France (Street in Cassis I)," ca. 1926-1929.
Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum
Johnson settled in the West 120s after his return from Europe in 1929, and lived “an artist’s life, with candles in bottles and no heat, but painting up a storm,” Powell said.
He received a prestigious gold medal that year from the Harmon Foundation, the philanthropic effort of a Brooklyn real estate developer who had purchased hundreds of acres in the borough in the early 1900s. Mecklenburg said he used his gains to support the work of budding Black artists, many of whom are featured in the Met’s show.
William Henry Johnson, Self-Portrait, 1929.
Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum
After another sojourn in Europe, Johnson returned to New York in 1938, living in Greenwich Village and teaching at the Harlem Community Arts Center.
“There’s a kind of new energy in the city, and Johnson plugs right into that,” Powell said. “Again, he does this radical turn, from painting landscapes and fjords in Denmark and Norway, to people walking up and down the streets of Harlem.”
These latter works, which feature simple figures painted in large blocks of flat and saturated colors, are perhaps Johnson’s best-known and most celebrated. Powell and others have noted how Johnson must have inspired Henry Taylor, the subject of a recent solo show at the Whitney Museum.
“Henry Taylor has a real love of what we call the ‘autographic brushstroke’ with his impasto acrylics,” Powell said, referring to the idea that a painter’s mark has a distinct and individual character. “I first saw that when I encountered the work of William Henry Johnson, and that’s quite exciting and lively for people who love painting.”
William Henry Johnson, "Woman in Blue."
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Mecklenburg said she believes Johnson’s turn toward folk art was a way of speaking to the communities he encountered working in Harlem.
“As simple as his later paintings are, they’re incredibly sophisticated in terms of their composition,” Mecklenburg said. “The Johnson paintings really stand out in the Met exhibit.”
After Johnson’s wife died in 1944, he returned to Scandinavia to be with her family. At this point his behavior became erratic, and he was eventually diagnosed with paresis, according to Mecklenburg.
Photo of William Henry Johnson's "Jim," 1930.
Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum
“He was combative and difficult, and was picked up as a vagrant on the streets, but he had all this artwork with him,” Mecklenburg said. “He was admitted to Central Islip State Hospital in 1947 and didn’t paint again.”
Johnson died there in 1970 at the age of 69.
At this point, the bulk of his artwork was nearly destroyed, after it languished in storage with no clear way to pay for upkeep.
“The stuff was just sitting on the docks and in a warehouse,” Powell said. “It was a whole process to figure out how to conserve these works.”
The recovered collection eventually went to the Harmon Foundation, which began looking for a permanent home for the art as it wound down its own operations in the 1960s.
Photo of William Henry Johnson's "Street Life, Harlem."
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
“MoMA wasn’t interested. The Whitney wasn’t interested,” Powell said. Finally the bulk of Johnson’s work went to the SAAM, which kept most of it, and distributed some 150 works to the museums of Historically Black Colleges and Universities including Fisk University and Howard University.
Ironically, the very move that saved the bulk of Johnson’s artwork may have limited the extent to which he was recognized, Mecklenburg said.
“It’s characteristic of the times that mainstream museums simply weren’t interested,” Mecklenburg said. “It was a tough time for Black artists.”
Steve Turner, a Los Angeles art dealer who acquired many of Johnson’s works from private collectors in Scandinavia in the 1990s, said that most artists grow in popularity when their artworks are spread to many different places.
“They were in the marketplace, they had a gallery, they sold here and there, this and that museum bought their work,” Turner said. “But with the lion’s share of Johnson’s work ending up at the Smithsonian, they can’t promote it as widely as it would be if it was in 50 different museums.”
SAAM has organized a major show featuring Johnson’s work about once per decade since the 1970s, Mecklenburg said, with the exhibitions generally touring to other cities and countries. The museum is planning a new show of Johnson’s late works that is set to open in March, titled “Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice.”
William H. Johnson, "Harriet Tubman," ca. 1945.
Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum
Mecklenburg, Powell, and Turner say they hope the new shows will bring renewed attention to Johnson's work and legacy. Being part of the Met’s blockbuster exhibit alongside more well-known figures of the movement like Jacob Lawrence and James Van Der Zee may help recast Johnson’s singular career.
“Throughout the Harlem Renaissance and into the 1940s, Johnson is asked: Why do you paint the way you paint?” Powell said. “He says, basically, ‘I’m getting an energy from my subjects and I want to put those ideas onto canvas.’”
“We find this language in the works of a lot of German expressionist artists from those years,” Powell said. “But Johnson is applying this to his own experience as a Black man. That’s what makes him so important.”
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