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The Washington Post STYLE People/Leisure/Comics Monday, November 8, 1971 B1 -------- Spirit of William H. Johnson By Paul Richard Though his father was white and his mother part Indian, the National Collection of Fine Arts calls William H. Johnson a black artist. He was black, all right. They did not let him forget it. It didn't matter much in France where, in the 1920s, he'd paint beside the Seine, but when he placed his easel in the street of Florence,n S.C., he was promptly thrown in jail. Just for being uppity. Johnson in America constantly endured such psychic degradations. Though the National Collection has now awarded him a full-dress retrospective- which he abundantly deserves-he almost never sold. Even the kindness that he received smacked of pride-destroying condescension. "The public generally is invited," said the Florence paper, "to inspect the work of the humble Negro youth whose real genius may some day make the city of his birth famous. It never happened. Though Jonson had devoted teachers and a remarkably happy marriage and a few good years abroad, his luck was mostly awful. He was always poor. He earned his living as a cook, a laborer, a porter, almost never as a painter. his Danish wide died painfully of cancer in 1943. Four years later, his brain decayed by syphilis, he was pick up wandering on the street and committed to New York's Central Islip State Hospital. It took him 23 years to die. But this exhibition is no guilt inspired bit of homage granted a neglected black. Johnson was a fine painter. His retrospective does the National Collection proud. Some artists are remembered for the brilliance of their skills, their leaps of imagination, their technical inventions. Johnson, who changed his style restlessly and often, is not one of these. It is his personality that matters. One leaves this show thinking less of the beauty of his pictures, though beautiful they are than of the spirit of the man. He was not an innovator. While studying with Charles Hawthorne at the National Academy of Design, he won prizes for the academic paintings in the Hawthorne manner. Though later he took much from other artists he admired- Cezanne, van Gogh, Soutine- there is within his works a vitality, an integrity, that his borrowings did not diminish. Look, for instance, at the 1929 self-portrait illustrated here. It has much Soutine and some Cezanne about it, but it is a Johnson most of all. He was searching for something. He struggled as he painted to grow increasingly honest, simple and authentic, to intentionally discard all false sophistication. His earliest pictures here are genteel and academic. He work became steadily more expressive while he lived in Europe. When he returned to the United States in the fall of 1938, his paintings abruptly changed again. "I am a Negro, and a primitive," he liked to say. In 1939, he started painting pictures that showed he was just that. He abandoned complex brush strokes, shading and perspective. His colors became flat and even brighter, his forms grew harshly angular and simple. No longer did he paint European landscapes or bowls of fruit on tables. His subject matter changed. He started painting black musicians, black Christs, lack prophets and black angels, jitterbugs and chain gangs. "There is no indication that his sudden turn to subjects drawn from black culture in the United States had any social motivation," writes Joshua C. Taylor, the National Collection's director, "for he was not a social crusader. To have used his homely images to make an obvious social plea would have blunted the subtler values of his new primitivism. One of his flat, but eloquent, patterns emerges a particular kind of awkward, unconventional beauty that sings it own song with harmonies unfamiliar to the schools. The works are expressive to be sure, but the expression springs from more that simply one individual's passion. . . He had found a union with the minds and imagination of others, as earlier he had found a union with the world he saw." These late works will probably become the most See JOHNSON, B6, Col.7 [[image]] "Self-Portrait," painted 1929. [[next page]] [[image]] "Chain Gang," painted 1930-1940.
