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                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 65

ART

Return from Alienation


By ROBERT HUGHES


    SHOWS: "WILLIAM H. JOHNSON: HIS EARLY CAREER"; "WILLIAM H.
           JOHNSON AND AFRO AMERICA"
    WHERE: Studio Museum in Harlem; Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York City
    WHAT: Paintings by William H. Johnson

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A deeply troubled and long-ignored black
American painter is given his due.


    Two shows this month in New York City -- a small survey at
the Studio Museum in Harlem and a larger one organized by the
National Museum of American Art in Washington and now at the
Whitney Museum of American Art -- are dedicated to the almost
forgotten artist William H. Johnson (1901-70). As a fine catalog
by Richard Powell makes clear, Johnson's life was one of the
saddest in the annals of American art. A painter of genuine
talent, he suffered most of his life from the consequences of
being born black in a deeply racist America -- and, it seems,
from a sense of alienation from other blacks because he was half
white. He came from a cotton hamlet in South Carolina and proved
himself a brilliant art student in Chicago. Like other black
artists and writers, he found refuge from America in Europe:
first in Paris (on a scholarship in the 1920s), then in the
south of France and finally -- having met and fallen in love
with Holcha Krake, a Danish artist 16 years older than he was
-- in Denmark, where he painted and exhibited with some success
through the 1930s.

    Passionate and energetic by nature, Johnson felt most
drawn to an Expressionist idiom. His particular heroes were
Chaim Soutine (especially the convulsive Ceret landscapes) and,
later, Oskar Kokoschka. At the outset, his homages to Soutine's
surging hills and toppling houses had a somewhat illustrational
tone -- painting from the motif, he sometimes used a distorting
lens to produce the effect, as earlier landscapists had used a
smoked Claude Lorraine glass -- so that the image turned out
more optical than visceral. But as his sense of the relations
between mark and motif increased, Johnson's landscapes
accumulated power, and some of the later Scandinavian ones, like
Harbor Under the Midnight Sun (1937), are robust, fluent and
assured. Johnson's early years are completely ignored at the
Whitney, which robs the show of any pretense of being a real
retrospective.

    European modernism "primitivized" Johnson, as though a
feedback loop were running from the Cubists' and Expressionists'
use of tribal African art to a black artist in a Danish fishing
village. "I myself feel like a primitive man," he told an
interviewer in 1935, echoing the modernist founding fathers
(Gauguin, Van Gogh), "like one who is at the same time both a
primitive and a cultured painter." In essence, as the sculptor
Martin Puryear points out in the catalog, European modernism let
Johnson see himself anew; it provoked him into negotiating "his
racial dilemma as a black artist moving between several worlds,
on terms that are never stable."

    This was the key problem of Johnson's last years. He and
Krake fled Scandinavia before the Nazi advance. They arrived in
New York in 1938. Johnson applied for a grant to revisit the
scenes of his childhood to "paint Negro people," as he put it,
"in their natural environment," meaning by "natural" the rural
South. The money didn't appear, but he painted the pictures
anyway without leaving Manhattan. For the next seven years of
his life, Johnson worked in a style that oscillated between folk
art and caricature. On the whole, his images of life and manners
in Harlem were the least successful. Some are done in a spirit
of racial cartooning so broad that they would seem obnoxious if
a white artist had made them.

    Probably Krake's enthusiasm for folk art pressed Johnson
to look hard at black women's quilts, with their strong
outlines -- shapes made by folding and cutting, very unlike the
fluid, convulsive drawing of his earlier paintings -- and their
bright blocks of distinct color.

    Could one construct an American epic in such terms?
Johnson clearly hoped to do so -- with a little help, evidently,
from the work of Stuart Davis and Lyonel Feininger as well;
several of his images of black Southern life from the early '40s
have a wonderful amplitude and strictness of construction that
hold their vivid colors together with a sort of consuming, sad
energy. They are the blues, in paint. Everything seems right
about the pattern of Sowing (circa 1940): the fierce orange and
yellow stripes, the eccentric placement and displacement of
shape, the not quite naive use of repetition and rhyme, even the
comic-strip blue cabin and the Looney Tunes mule. And The
Breakdown (circa 1940-41), showing a sharecropper's feet
protruding from beneath his stalled jalopy while a huge sun
sinks and his wife scrapes together a meal by the side of the
road, has some of the deep, wry, emblematic pathos of Philip
Guston's late work.

    But not all Johnson's work was on this distinguished
level, and it declined badly as, around the end of World War II,
his life fell apart. First, to his un assuageable grief, Krake
died of cancer. Then he began to show the symptoms of tertiary
syphilis. The last works that hold some spark of visual life are
Johnson's religious subjects, such as the beautiful tempera
drawing Ezekiel Saw the Wheel (circa 1942-43). After the war he
began a series of paintings of Fighters for Freedom: political
figures (Chiang Kai-shek, Churchill, Nehru and others) and
icons of black history, such as Nat Turner hanged on a tree.
They are mostly feeble, lacking the iconic power and
brilliantly felt color of the earlier work. By 1946, for all
intents, Johnson's life as an artist was over. He made a return
trip to Denmark but sank into insanity in Copenhagen, where the
police picked him up as a grimy street bum lugging burlap sacks
of his own -- to them, weird-looking -- paintings.

    In 1947 Johnson had to be shipped back to America, where
he was consigned to a grim state lunatic asylum at Islip, New
York. He never emerged from it -- or painted again. The last of
his money paid for storage of the enormous, unsorted mass of
Johnson's canvases, possessions and oddments. New York museums
were not interested, but finally in 1966 the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington agreed to house his life's work.
Johnson was too far gone to register this; in 1970, still
confined in Islip, he died.

    It is unlikely that this show will force a sudden
rewriting of American art history. No judgment by aesthetic,
rather than racial, criteria can make him into a lost "great
American painter," though certainly he was a good one. The show,
and in particular Powell's detailed catalog -- a benchmark in
the study of black American art -- do open a door for Johnson's
entry into that history, even though Powell's claim that Johnson
was a kind of black Marsden Hartley, discovering full
identification with his people through folk culture, passing
from a "narrow and skewed" Eurocentric primitivism to a fully
integrated "black, populist aesthetic," seems overblown. What
matters, however, is that he once was lost, and now is found.