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COLEMAN 19

Another type of remembered South can be gleaned from the works of William H. Johnson (1901-1970). Born in Florence, South Carolina, Johnson studied at the National Academy of Design in New York. A Pioneer Afro-American modernist, Johnson, however, was to work in several different styles. His works that were based upon a remembered folk type is the style that afforded him the greatest critical notice. Many of these paintings dealt with religious subjects, such as Mt. Calvary (1939), that were placed [[strikethrough]] [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] in non-site specific landscapes. However, [[strikethrough]] we [[/strikethrough]] the images are placed in a ritualized space, determined in its unexpectedness upon the artist's intuition and subconscious.  The groundline for many of these works is the South-- the filtered memory of the Land of his birth.

The artist that presents a distinct visual mythic reference to a remembered South is Romare Bearden (1912-1988). A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden, however, was educated in the public schools of New York City, New York University and the Art Students League.

Bearden's work of the early 1940's can be compared to blues shouts, and subsequent periods to hyphenated blues-jazz types, never completely removed very long from the blues paradigm. Ralph Ellison writes about time, place, and culture in shaping the artistic vision thusly:

Writers, in their formative period, adsorb into their consciousness much that has no special value until much later, and often much which is of not special value even then-- perhaps, beyond the fact that it throbs with affect and mystery and in it 'time and pain and royalty in the blood' are suspended in imagery.