Monday, March 18, 2024

“Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice”


Also see https://africanamericanartq.blogspot.com/2020/07/william-h-johnson.html

William H. Johnson (1901–1970) painted his last body of work, the “Fighters for Freedom” series, in the mid-1940s as a tribute to African American activists, scientists, teachers and performers as well as international leaders working to bring peace to the world. The landmark exhibition “Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice,” brings together—for the first time since 1946—34 paintings featured in the series, including 32 drawn from the museum’s collection of more than 1,000 works by Johnson. 

Two paintings, “Three Great Freedom Fighters” and “Against the Odds,” are on loan from the Hampton University Museum of Art exclusively for the presentation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition illuminates the extraordinary life and contributions of Johnson, an artist associated with the Harlem Renaissance but whose practice spanned several continents, as well as the contributions of historical figures he depicted.  

Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice” is on view from March 8 through Sept. 8 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s main building in Washington, D.C. It is organized by Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Laura Augustin Fox, curatorial collections coordinator.  

“By telling the stories of those who fought for social and racial justice, both historically and in his own time, the remarkable artist William H. Johnson should be more widely known and this exhibition aims to do that by reaffirming the central importance of African Americans to the American narrative,” said Stephanie Stebich, the Margaret and Terry Stent Director. “It is an awesome and humbling responsibility to build on more than 50 years of the Smithsonian American Art Museum of preserving, displaying and interpreting a lifetime of work by this great American artist whose bold graphic images are not soon forgotten.”  

Some of Johnson’s “Fighters”—Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, Mohandas Gandhi and 


William H. Johnson, Harriet Tubman, ca. 1945, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1146


Harriet Tubman—are familiar figures; others—Nannie Helen Burroughs and William Grant Still, among them—are less well-known individuals whose achievements have been eclipsed over time. Johnson celebrates their accomplishments even as he acknowledges the realities of racism, oppression and sometimes violence they faced and overcame. Johnson clues viewers to significant episodes in the “Fighters” lives by punctuating each portrait with tiny buildings, flags and vignettes that give insight into their stories. Using a colorful palette to create evocative scenes and craft important narratives, he suggests that the pursuit of freedom is an ongoing, interconnected struggle, with moments of both triumph and tragedy. These paintings invite the viewer to reflect on the struggles for justice today.  

“Through Johnson’s ‘Fighters for Freedom’ paintings, we learn about people who changed lives, promoted equality, valued legacy and demonstrated unflagging determination in the face of almost insurmountable challenges,” Mecklenburg said. “He tells us that the continued fight for equity, dignity and equality for all is central to the American story.”  

The museum has created extensive educational materials and in-gallery interpretation strategies to deepen visitors’ understanding of Johnson and the featured historical figures. A visual timeline puts Johnson’s life events in context with key moments in African American history and the lives of his “Fighters.”

The museum has produced short videos to accompany five paintings on view, each featuring commentary from curators from across the Smithsonian discussing collection objects, including Nat Turner’s Bible and Marian Anderson’s fur coat, that give insight into the people depicted in each work. Four interactive in-gallery kiosks provide information about Johnson’s visual references and historical source material that “decode” selected compositions and uncover the meaning behind the imagery. A separate media space invites visitors to experience select “Fighters” in action through archival video, audio and images. The museum’s efforts to conserve Johnson’s artworks are documented in a short video and wall panels, highlighting the recent preservation work of the “Fighters for Freedom” paintings. Additional elements include tactile reproductions and visual descriptions of key works; an all ages reading room that offers visitors a chance to gather, learn and reflect; and a mural featuring responses from students across the country about people they consider fighters for freedom today. 

About William H. Johnson

Johnson was born in Florence, South Carolina, in 1901, but left the Jim Crow South as a teenager to go to New York City. In 1921, he passed the entrance exam at the National Academy of Design. By the time he finished five years later, he had won most of the prizes the academy offered. Johnson left for Europe, where he painted landscapes that marked him as an up-and-coming modernist. After three years in France, Johnson returned to the United States in 1929, meeting Harlem Renaissance luminaries Alain Locke and Langston Hughes during that time. He left again for Europe after less than a year. He married Danish weaver Holcha Krake in 1930, and they spent most of the decade in Scandinavia, where Johnson's interest in European modernism had a noticeable impact on his work.

In late 1938, with World War II imminent, the couple returned to New York, where he was soon recognized as a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson abandoned the dazzling landscapes he painted in Scandinavia to focus instead on the lives of African Americans. He painted Southern sharecroppers, city hipsters, Black soldiers training for war, religious scenes and his last series, “the Fighters for Freedom.” It was a trying time in Johnson’s personal life. His wife developed breast cancer, and after she died in 1944, Johnson’s mental health deteriorated. In 1947, he was confined to Central Islip State Hospital in New York, where he remained until his death in 1970.  

In 1967, the William E. Harmon Foundation, the patron of African American artists that cared for Johnson’s work after his hospitalization, entrusted his life’s work—paintings, watercolors, prints and drawings—to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The museum, in turn, offered almost 150 paintings and prints to other institutions. As a result, historically Black universities, including Fisk, Hampton, Howard, Morgan State and others, have rich collections of Johnson’s work. The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds the largest and most complete collection of work by Johnson. It has done much in the past 50 years to preserve Johnson’s art and establish his reputation by organizing exhibitions and installations of his work and an ongoing program of conservation for these fragile paintings. Most recently, the museum has loaned six works by Johnson to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s groundbreaking exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” (2024). 

Book



A beautifully illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition, co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Scala Arts Publishers Inc. It is written by Mecklenburg, with an introduction by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, a foreword by Stebich and contributions by Tiffany D. Farrell and Emily H. Rohan. 

National Tour

The exhibition debuted at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2022. It traveled to the Albany Museum of Art in Georgia; the Oklahoma City Museum of Art; The Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York; and the Wichita Museum of Art in Kansas. Future presentations include the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum in Miami.

Images



: William H. Johnson, Three Great Abolitionists: A. Lincoln, F. Douglass, J. Brown (detail), ca. 1945. Oil on paperboard, 37 3/8 x 34 1/4 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1983.95.51

Media - 1967.59.657 - SAAM-1967.59.657_2 - 141186

William H. Johnson, Marian Anderson, ca. 1945, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.657

Media - 1967.59.1154 - SAAM-1967.59.1154_3 - 142406
William H. Johnson, Toussaint l'Ouverture, Haiti, ca. 1945, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1154
Media - 1967.59.1150 - SAAM-1967.59.1150_2 - 141184
William H. Johnson, Women Builders, 1945, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1150

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism

 



Exhibition Dates: February 25–July 28, 2024 
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 999

A painting of a black woman in a blue dress seated on a yellow chair
 

Image: William Henry Johnson (American, 1901–1970). Woman in Blue, c. 1943. Oil on burlap. Framed: 35 × 27 in. (88.9 × 68.6 cm). Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Permanent Loan from the National Collection of Fine Art,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism from February 25 through July 28, 2024. Through some 160 works, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and will situate Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.   




A significant percentage of the paintings, sculpture, and works on paper on view in the exhibition come from the extensive collections of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art. Other major lenders include the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. The exhibition will also include loans from significant private collections and European museums.

“This landmark exhibition reframes the Harlem Renaissance, cementing its place as the first African American–led movement of international modern art,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “Through compelling portraits, vibrant city scenes, history paintings, depictions of early mass protests and activism, and dynamic portrayals of night life created by leading artists of the time, the exhibition boldly underscores the movement’s pivotal role in shaping the portrayal of the modern Black subject—and indeed the very fabric of early 20th-century modern art.”

“We are very pleased to present this wide-ranging exhibition that establishes the New Negro cohort of African American artists and their allies—now known as the Harlem Renaissance—at the vanguard of the portrayal of modern Black life and culture in Harlem and other new Black cities nationwide at a time of rapid expansion in the first decades of the Great Migration,” added Denise Murrell, The Met’s Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large. “Many New Negro artists spent extended periods abroad and joined the multiethnic artistic circles in Paris, London, and Northern Europe that shaped the development of international modern art. The exhibition underscores the essential role of the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new modes of portraying the modern Black subject as central to the development of transatlantic modern art.”
 
"This landmark exhibition celebrates the brilliant and talented artists behind the groundbreaking cultural movement we now know as the Harlem Renaissance," said Ford Foundation president Darren Walker. "I thank the dedicated team at The Met and applaud Denise Murrell for her vision and thoughtful curation of this vibrant collection of paintings, sculptures, film, and photography that gives a powerful glimpse into the Black experience in the early 20th century."
 
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism will open with galleries that explore the cultural philosophy that gave shape to the New Negro movement of art and literature, as the period was known at inception, using a term defined and popularized by the movement’s founding philosopher, Howard University professor Alain Locke, in dialogue and debate with W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and influential literary and music figures including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. At the core of the exhibition are the artists who shared a commitment to depicting the modern Black subject in a radically modern way and to refusing the prevailing racist stereotypes. 

Although united in their shared objective to portray all aspects of modern Black life and culture, individual New Negro artists developed widely varied representational styles, ranging from an engagement with African and Egyptian aesthetics and European avant-garde pictorial strategies to a commitment to classicized academic tradition. Featured artists include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Bert Hurley, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Jr., Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring.  

The exhibition will continue with galleries devoted to genre scenes and portraiture that capture all aspects of Black city life in the 1920s–40s as seen in vibrant paintings, sculpture, and film projections as well as photography from The Met’s recently acquired James Van Der Zee Archive and artists’ cover illustrations for books and periodicals, including the NAACP’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Monumentally scaled allegorical history paintings and portraits of luminaries will provide compelling vista views.

Galleries featuring paintings by New Negro artists who lived and worked in Europe during extended periods of expatriation will present their work in direct juxtaposition with portrayals of the international African diaspora by Black and white European artists including Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso, as well as Germaine Casse, Kees van Dongen, Jacob Epstein, and Ronald Moody.

The New Negro era’s fraught approach to social issues including queer identity, colorism and class tensions, and interracial relations will be the subject of a gallery featuring paintings, ephemera, and photography animated by film clips. The exhibition will conclude with an artist-as-activist gallery spotlighting artists’ treatment of social justice issues as the New Negro era comes to a close on the cusp of the 1950s civil rights movement. A coda will feature Romare Bearden’s 15-foot-wide series of collages, The Block (1970), from The Met collection, which evokes a town house row in mid-century Harlem and that sustains the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

In preparation for the exhibition, The Met undertook extensive archival research, original photography, technical imaging, and conservation treatment of important but seldom seen works of art. For example, archival research by the curatorial team resulted in the first-ever dating of two Laura Wheeler Waring portraits from her family’s collections: Girl with Pomegranate (ca. 1940) and Girl in Pink Dress (ca. 1927). 

The Met has an extended history of collecting and displaying works by artists active during the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1940s, the Museum acquired several early works by gift from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), such as Jacob Lawrence’s Pool Parlor (1942) and Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr.’s Self-Portrait (ca. 1941). 

In 1969, the Museum presented the exhibition “Harlem on My Mind”: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, which was met with great controversy for excluding works of painting and sculpture by Black artists and instead presenting a social narrative of Harlem told through reproductions of newspaper clippings and photographs of prominent leaders and anonymous Harlem residents—in large-scale dioramas more similar to ethnographic or natural history museum displays than to art museum galleries. 

For the nearly 50 years since that exhibition, The Met has expanded its holdings of works produced during the Harlem Renaissance—notably in 2021 with the establishment of the James Van Der Zee Archive in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem—and through the acquisition of paintings including by Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles Alston it continues to be an area of focus. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism will provide an art and artist centered celebration and investigation into the Harlem Renaissance as a trailblazing, pivotal period within the art of the 20th century. 

Credits 

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is organized by The Met’s Denise Murrell, PhD, Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, Office of the Director, in consultation with an advisory committee of leading scholars.

Catalogue

A fully illustrated scholarly catalogue on the vibrant history of the Harlem Renaissance will accompany the exhibition. It will feature essays that explore how the flow of ideas through Black artistic communities on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to international conversations around art, race, and identity while helping to define our notion of modernism. The catalogue is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press; it will be available for purchase from The Met Store.   
 


Images:

Sunday, March 10, 2024

American Etchers

 

Childs Gallery 
Martin Lewis, American (1881-1962)
Little Penthouse, 1931
Drypoint, 10 x 7 inches

Acquire this artwork

From 1929 to 1931, the American Etchers series was published as a set of twelve volumes, each dedicated to a contemporary printmaker and featuring reproductions of their works. A deluxe edition of seventy-five was also produced, which included commissioned, original prints by the artists.

Childs Gallery is pleased to present eleven prints from the deluxe set, each sold with their original American Etchers volume. Each artwork and volume is number sixty-two from the limited edition of seventy-five, and all but the Heintzelman volume contain the original notarized certificate of authenticity.

Artists featured are: John Taylor Arms, George Elbert Burr, Kerr Eby, Childe Hassam, Arthur W. Heintzelman, Alfred Hutty, Philip Kappel, Troy Kinney, Martin Lewis, Louis Rosenberg, and Ernest D. Roth.  

Please inquire for further information on individual prints.

Childe Hassam, American (1859-1935)
Egeria, 1929
Etching, 5 x 3 inches

Acquire this artwork
John Taylor Arms, American (1887-1953)
Rio del Santi Apostoli, Venice, 1930
Etching, 8 x 6 inches

Acquire this artwork
Alfred Hutty, American (1877-1954)
In a Southern City, 1929
Etching, 7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches

Acquire this artwork
George Elbert Burr, American (1859-1939)
Arizona Night, 1930
Drypoint, 7 x 9 inches

Acquire this artwork
Ernest D. Roth, American (1879-1964)
Union Square, NYC, 1929
Etching, 9 7/8 x 7 1/2 inches

Acquire this artwork
Louis Rosenberg, American (1890-1983)
Bab-el-Khoukha, Kairovah, 1930
Etching, 8 x 6 inches

Acquire this artwork
Philip Kappel, American (1901-1981)
Barranquilla, Colombia, S.A., 1930
Etching, 9 x 7 inches

Acquire this artwork
Troy Kinney, American (1871-1938)
Ruth St. Denis, 1930
Etching, 7 1/2 x 5 5/ 8 inches

Acquire this artwork
Arthur W. Heintzelman, American
(1891-1965)
Bambino, 1930
Etching, 6 1/3 x 5 1/2 inches

Acquire this artwork
Kerr Eby, American (1889-1946)
Spring Plowing, 1930
Etching, 7 1/8 x 10 1/8 inches

Acquire this artwork