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NORWAY - LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN - Oil

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STREET, CAGNES - Oil

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GOING TO CHURCH - Oil

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COME UNTO ME, LITTLE CHILDREN - Gouache

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A DANISH FISHERMAN - Oil

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JOHN BROWN LEGEND - Oil on board

It was the rumble of war in Europe in 1938 that brought them to New York and here, too, all their exhibits were joint projects. Even after Holcha's death in January 1943, he continued to bring her work to his showings.

Johnson Changes his Art Technique In New York

For some reason, New York brought about an almost immediate transition in Johnson's style-more direct and more primitive. He began doing religious paintings, speaking through them always to the Negro peoples. A Danish critic who saw Come Unto Me Little Children in 1947 at the Johnson exhibit in Copenhagen called this "a far cry from ecclesiastical art, which in Europe has become flat and preoccupied."

"He has captured the naïveté of the Italian Primitives, the culture of discarding non-essentials of the African Negro art, and has added his own brave, intelligent and emotional qualities," said a critic in Chicago of them. Of his Nativity and Descent From The Cross, the Art Digest stated they were "willfully naïve designs, are sincere and carry a moving conviction."

Johnson's development into a more primitive style aroused mostly favorable critical comment over the years in New York. Said A.F. Kruse in the New York Sun, "Seven years ago, Johnson... painted in the Scandinavian countries and came back with expressionistic marines of high esthetic voltage. More and more he has striven since then to obtain the significance of images in action with the least amount of physical to-do. Now with a palette of no more than four or five colors and using primed cardboard panels, he produces, with a naïveté all his own, such diverse subjects as The Nativity, Li'l Sis and Moon Over Harlem. He is definitely an American modern."

Johnson Interests Himself In Social And Historical Trends

The war and its activities with soldier and sailor entertainment, the Red Cross and related events caught Johnson's attention in the early 1940's and his story-telling, warm caricature-like pictures were widely shown. The year following his wife's death, in 1944, he visited his mother in Florence, S.C. "I don't like the South," he often said, and this was only his second trip there after his first European study tour. But he did many delightful portraits of his family members and friends following this trip. They have on the clean, crisp printed dresses of the women done in great detail; with just a touch of the brush to add a bow in the hair. These show the dignity of his folk-feeling and his complete delight in painting them. 

Johnson's last paintings were his most ambitious as to execution and inclusive subject matter-his social, historical and political panels. These had but one showing in the United States. He had been working as a laborer in the Navy Yard and earlier in WPA (Art Project) and some of his social thinking crystallized in these subjects. In late 1946 he packed these and every other piece of his work he had and some of his friends had, and returned to the Denmark he loved.