Return From Alienation

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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."