The lost master artist at the center of the Met’s Harlem Renaissance show
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s massive new jazz age exhibition opening on Sunday is a comprehensive survey of New York’s homegrown movement of Black music, literature and visual art.” will showcase paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography and more, and highlights the contemporaneous connections between Harlem and Europe.
But he soon broke the mold and moved to France in the mid-1920s, where he married a Danish artist. His style underwent a dramatic evolution that ventured into French Impressionism and German-style Expressionism before it became something uniquely African American.“In a fairly brief career, Johnson produced an amazing array of artworks that walk us through modernism in world art with a focus on Black culture,” Powell said. “That's what makes them so amazing.
“There’s a kind of new energy in the city, and Johnson plugs right into that,” Powell said. “Again, he does this radical turn, from painting landscapes and fjords in Denmark and Norway, to people walking up and down the streets of Harlem.” “As simple as his later paintings are, they’re incredibly sophisticated in terms of their composition,” Mecklenburg said. “The Johnson paintings really stand out in the Met exhibit.”
The recovered collection eventually went to the Harmon Foundation, which began looking for a permanent home for the art as it wound down its own operations in the 1960s.“MoMA wasn’t interested. The Whitney wasn’t interested,” Powell said. Finally the bulk of Johnson’s work went to the SAAM, which kept most of it, and distributed some 150 works to the museums of Historically Black Colleges and Universities including Fisk University and Howard University.
Steve Turner, a Los Angeles art dealer who acquired many of Johnson’s works from private collectors in Scandinavia in the 1990s, said that most artists grow in popularity when their artworks are spread to many different places.
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