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 unassuageable 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.