Trembling Vistas, Primal Youth: William H. Johnson’s Painterly Expressionism

Taking selected cues from modern painting, the African American artist William Henry Johnson (1901-1970) introduced a radical and, arguably, a unique perspective onto avant-garde portraiture and landscapes: views of peoples and places informed by an emotionally charged, gesture-imposed vantage point. Whether the rendering was of a small town in the American South, the French Riviera, a Scandinavian city, or the inhabitants of the aforesaid locations, Johnson imposed upon these subjects an agitated yet knowing brushstroke, saturated with colorful pigments, and infused with the strategically crafted personae of a self-proclaimed primitive, mixed-race cosmopolitan, and visionary.