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WILLIAM H. JOHNSON
an artist of the world scene

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B.T. WASHINGTON LEGEND - Gouache.  MT CALVARY - Gouache.   LI'L SIS - Oil on board

William H. Johnson, the American artist of Negro origin, saw a colorful lyrical world, as he made his way from the Deep South, across Europe and North Africa, and into the clear mountain air of Norway above the Arctic Circle. On this twenty year odyssey, he observed life and customs through the universal language of art. He painted hundreds of oils, water-colors, goaches, and pen an dink sketches; and further recorded his impressions with block prints and silk screens-each motif representating a novel artistic experience. 

Johnson was born in the Negro section of Florence, South Carolina, in 1901. His parents were poor, simple-living folk. His schooling had to be brief, because as the eldest of five children, his working and earning from an early age was necessary. In those years at the start of the century, there was no ray of opportunity that he might grasp to lift himself out of these circumstances. Yet, he aspired to be an artist! He worked at this strange ambition the best way he could.

He Set His Course In Art Copying Cartoons
"I began copying the humorous drawings in our news-papers," he says, "And the joy I derived from these may without a doubt be ascribed to the way we primitive people always adore caricatures." So he set his course in the field of art.

"You have to search your way forward," he said once many years later in an interview in Stockholm, Sweden. "You have to dare something when you are young."

From copying cartoons as a method of self-training in art, he derived the ability to tell a story in a picture. He also carried a caricature-like lilt throughout his entire art career. He had five years of formal training at the National Academy of Design in New York, working during all of that time at any kind of job he could find, for he still had to send money home. He won outstanding art prizes while a student there and in 1926, through the interest of friends of the late Charles W. Hawthorne, outstanding artist of the time, a fund was raised to send him aboard for a study.

Johnson's short story technique in his painting became apparent in his first impressionistic work in France and Corsica with his strong blue skies of the Riviera, the crooked streets running a rick-rack course up a hill and carrying the sun-baked buildings along with them. He seemed to know how to get down to the bare essentials and to pull out what he needed. In late 1929, he returned to this country to startle and interest the art world in his work. He received in January 1930 the Gold Aware in Art of the Harmon Foundation.

He Marries a Danish Artist
That same year he went back to Europe and married the Danish ceramic and textile artist, Holcha Krake. They had met the year before at Cagnes-sur-Mer, the artist colony in Southern France where she had gone with her sister and brother-in-law, a German sculptor and had all traveled together across France and Belgium and finally to Holcha's home in Odense where Johnson was warmly received by her family.

In the smiling little fishing village of Kerteminde, Denmark, where the Johnsons made their home, he intrigued the native folk with what his painter's eye saw in the gardens, the old houses and the clusters of red roofs.

"His art is a form of expressionism, a dynamic one, which never really has flowered here in Denmark." wrote a Danish art critic. "For him and all those who can master it, that close feeling of life evident in lines and colors is something very important which makes the motif live in one's consciousness. Just take a look at the street which waves in and out among the red roofs of Kerteminde. They make the gray line of the street swing out and glow through the