The Arc of William H. Johnson

a self portrait of william h johnson in his mid-20s reveals a very light skinned man with thin features, brown hair, and a red and black patterned robe or shirt, lit by a single strong source amidst a very shadowy black background. collection saam
William H. Johnson, Self-Portrait, 1923-26, oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 23 3/4 in., collection SAAM

William H. Johnson left South Carolina for New York when he was 17, and began studying painting at the National Academy of Design. He painted this self-portrait in his early 20s, giving himself lighter skin than in later portraits.

a range of spiky purple mountains poke up into a vivid yellow sky with a clearly drawn sun circle at the top center. some green in the lower valleys in the foreground and trenches of white merging into all white glaciers or snow along the left side all feel representative of lofoten norway, where william h johnson depicted the midnight sun in 1937. collection saam
William H. Johnson, Midnight Sun, Lofoten, 1937, oil on burlap, 41 5/8 x 59 1/8 in., collection SAAM

He went to Europe in 1926 to study modernism, married Danish artist Holcha Krake, and spent a decade working, showing, and traveling in Scandinavia. He painted several extraordinary, expressionistic views of Lofoten, Norway. These landscapes and his European-era figure paintings feel like they could have evolved from Soutine, or Hartley.

a radically simplified linear style with a modern, limited palette of chartreuse, purple, yellow, orange, and brown skin tone all come together in a scene of a black family fixing a flat tire on their older car. the father is working the jack while the mother holds a baby and a kid stands next to them. the vernacular style feels as much like african mask-inspired features as picasso, which would be apt. collection saam
William H. Johnson, Breakdown with Flat Tire, 1940-41, oil on plywood, 34 1/8 x 37 1/2 in., collection SAAM

Johnson returned to NYC with Krake in 1938, and began painting in an African American vernacular mode that feels as close to Horace Pippin as to Picasso. After Krake’s death from cancer in 1944, Johnson moved back to Denmark, making American and African American history paintings for a while, but a mental health crisis led to his return to the States, the end of painting, and hospitalization until his death in 1970.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds over 1,000 works by Johnson, and has two dozen on view at the moment. The SAAM bio makes it sound like they rescued these works after Johnson’s death, but I think most, if not all, were donated upon the dissolution of the Harmon Foundation in 1967.

The Harmon Foundation was established by a white real estate developer named William Harmon to collect, promote, and exhibit art by Black artists. There are some problematics in the Harmon Foundation’s story—they removed portraits of W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson from exhibitions because of their communist sympathies, for example—and it’s not clear if Johnson’s reputation suffered from his association. It does feel like he’s been sort of stuck at one museum, though.

There’s a lot that doesn’t immediately make sense. But the most important thing—besides donating its large collection of art to HBCUs and the Smithsonian, and besides Johnson’s own work, of course—is that William Harmon created his foundation after years of pseudonymous philanthropy and non-predatory student loaning—under the name of an ancestor, Jedediah Tingle.