Viewing page 21 of 41

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

3.

"He has found colors in Nature that Nordic painters have been forced to go to France to find", says a Swedish art critic of Johnson's Norway paintings. The Norwegians felt that Johnson had brought the whole landscape back with him from the Lofoten Islands (Svolvaer) and the far northern city of Tromsoe. Equally impressed were the people of Stockholm when he exhibited his Norway paintings there. They admired the fairy-tale mountains, rising into unscalable sharp peaks with some times a few sheep-herders huts huddled in the foreground as though daring to be cozy in such awesome surroundings.

Pola Gauguin, critic-son of the great painter, when he viewed these Norwegian landscapes said, "Johnson is a primitive with a marked sense for simplicity with colors whose appeal to the eye is chiefly decorative... In spite of a very obvious French influence, there is something in the nature of his forms and lines, which has great original charm and is a definite expression of a viewpoint and perception and are very much different from the European, even when the latter strives to give a primitive impression".

HUSBAND AND WIFE IN THE LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN

When the artist couple took the small fiord steamer from Aalesund north to Tromsoe, further into the land of the midnight sun, they immersed themselves in this awesome display of Nature and both of them painted. Theirs was, indeed, a marriage of complete artistic devotion, Johnson's hand reproduced the gigantic and exotic with explosive colors; Holcha's pictures were "richer in detail, but their colors warm and beautiful. His is a catchy and resounding overture, but there are also many quiet and melodious themes which will be enjoyed by all who will listen". (Critic Gnist in Trondheim (Norway) newspaper).

Their home in Svolvaer on the Lofoten Islands was truly a paradise for such sensitive people, for in this latitude they faced the West and watched the sun go down on the horizon and start right back up again. Their work went on around the clock, the painting and she weaving on her copy of the Baldershol Tapestry.

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 people. A Danis. 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 naivete 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 his "NATIVITY" and "DESCENT FROM THE CROSS,” the Art Digest stated they were "willfully naive designs, sincere and carry a moving conviction".

Transcription Notes:
duplicate of page 14?