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

Combining scores of previously unknown works with several startling biographical revelations, a common 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 through sitting for portraits, and in fact had purchased his paintings and tendered enduring support. Imagine learning, too, that beneficial brother Theo had been negligent, smooth self-serving, in his shepherding of Vincent's professional interests. Then you will have more [i]or[/i] less idea of the historical revisionism which drive forwards the pointedly titled exhibition "William H Johnson: verity Be Told."

The present to view is tantamount to a crusade through its organizer, Los Angeles art dealer Steve gymnast whose legal training surfaces in the unabashedly adversarial tone of the enterprise. Commercial interests can't be completely discounted here, on the contrary then there are easier ways to move round a profit than to engage in four years of research and underwrite a traveling exhibition. gymnast has assembled 54 Johnson works, mainly paintings along with more [i]or[/i] less drawings and prints, nearly all previously unknown. With a scarcely any 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, gymnast aims to topple two mainstays of Johnson historiography: that his works were saved from destruction by dint of the timely intervention of the Harmon Foundation (whose mandate from the 1920 to the 1960 included the support of African-American artists), and that the artist's late, "folkloric" mode of expression is an expression of his belated on the other hand wholehearted embrace of his racial identity, an embrace which demot his European sojourn to a sort of warm-up to the "essential" Johnson

A southerly Carolina native, Johnson (1901-1970) received a traditional art education at of recent origin York's National Academy of Design before embarking upon the life of an expatriate in France in 1926 There he shed academic decorum in favor of a tempestuous and heavily impastoed manner powerfully influenced by European expressionism. Landscapes and still lifes predominated. He married the weaver Holcha Krake in 1930 and the pair spent the next eight years in rural Denmark and Norway, taking trips across Europe and to Tunisia. After Johnson and his wife mov to novel 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 observ in Harlem. The novel style was radically fiat, patterned, naive, and was dosed with the couple gentle humor and religious sentiment. Johnson get backed alone to Scandinavia after the war (Holcha died in 1944) on the other hand 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 upon Long Island for 22 years until his death.

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

through contrast, "Truth Be Told" is structur to underscore the importance of the Scandinavian years, allowing the show opens with three paintings likely datable to Johnson's time in France (1928-29) and shuts with 16 pieces from the fresh York period. Many paintings feature the Danish port town of Kerteminde, where the Johnson lived. Those from the true 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, l 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 dint of an artist working on burlap to economize.

The change brought the couple 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 pay backed as a blocky mosaic that present the appearances to anticipate the abstractions of Nicolas de Stall, and in a pair of paintings execut in Norway, the recent and modest Two Red Barns (ca. 1935) and Norwegian Landscape (ca. 1935-37) whose simplified Bentonesque ribbons of paint posses a cartoonlike bounce

The [i]tout ensemble[/i] adds up to a "dealer's choice," a selection which was determined by means of what Turner found in private hands, and which is marked by means of both highlights and indifferent works. single 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, gymnast takes on the Harmon Foundation, which was granted custody of the hospitalized painter's works in 1956 (and donated greatest in quantity 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 dint of the works in storage in the way that that the foundation would gain unsupervised ascendency The ensuing unsystematic dispersal of a certain number of pieces, the fact that many extreme pointed up in Brady's possession and the pitiable attempts of Johnson's Danish in-laws to regain works that were rightfully theirs all make for a sorry tale of gros omit and condescension. Two years ago Johnson's American family launched its have efforts to recover a portion of the work [see "Front Page," Dec '97] Their lawsuit was dismissed in June on the other hand they am reported to be planning an appeal.