William H. Johnson: A Brief, Vibrant Career

The rediscovery of a gifted but mostly forgotten historical artist is a difficult process. Success doesn’t rest on intrinsic merit alone. Timing counts.

The timing might be right for William H. Johnson (1901-1970). The 19 paintings and like number of works on paper currently at Steve Turner Gallery record the compelling trajectory of a painter whose development to maturity was remarkably rapid and whose career was brief, cut short by war and personal tragedy.

Johnson’s art must be seen in the vivifying context of the “New Negro” movement, meaning the creation of a politically aware and culturally astute African American society. The movement gained popular currency around 1925-26, just as the South Carolina-born artist was finishing his studies at New York’s rather staid National Academy of Design. Encompassing an aesthetic of progress, the “New Negro” was a metaphor of enlightened self-discovery--which for Johnson came to mean the bohemianism of European Modern art.

At the Turner Gallery, two soft-focus paintings made in the south of France around 1928-29 employ a gentle Cubist structure that sets the landscape heaving. Two years later, after moving to a small fishing village in Denmark, Johnson went all the way. He painted the town’s main street and its old church in a blunt, aggressive manner that wedded the strenuous, bulging structure of the French landscapes with intense color and convulsive brushwork that sent the picture spinning. “Langegade, Kerteminde” (1930-31) is the first of several knockout pictures in the how.

The vibrant painting recalls the Expressionist precedent of the Lithuanian artist Chaim Soutine, which Johnson had encountered in France. So does a voluptuous 1934 portrait of a bright-eyed young boy, in which the playfulness of youth bumps up against maturity through the deceptively difficult mastery of so-called naive painting style. The child is indeed father of the man in this lovely and poetic work.

Tenderness and turbulence are twin threads running through most of Johnson’s art, while the eventual appearance of thickly applied impasto that characterizes subsequent work yields a literal sense of building a new world. One picture, which shows a harbor scene doubled by reflections in water, verges on total abstraction.

Johnson traveled through North Africa in 1932, and that visit no doubt had an impact on the heightened color and palette-knife impasto that soon emerged in his work. Perhaps the most remarkable picture here is “Norwegian Landscape” (circa 1935-37), in which a green and yellow hill swells into a crimson barn rising up next to a wild and verdant tree. Fecund and impossibly beautiful, the earth seems to teeter on the verge of eruption.

The show also includes a variety of works on paper, the most compelling being blunt woodcuts in a German Expressionist mode. Several other prints, made after Johnson’s return to New York at the start of World War II, feature simplified figures, flat blocks of color and syncopated compositions that suggest an affinity for the work of the young Jacob Lawrence.

Johnson’s art has turned up in a number of group exhibitions since his death, which followed more than 20 years of inactivity during hospitalization for dementia. In 1971 and 1991, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, which owns more than 1,000 of his paintings, drawings and prints, organized solo shows.

In 1971, though, Modernist painting was a pretty tough sell for contemporary eyes. Then, the 1991 show focused on the New York work, which is less adventurous than Johnson’s expatriate paintings from the 1930s and perhaps suffered in comparison to Lawrence.

Painting is everywhere in galleries today, however, and that renewed prominence can only help a reconsideration of Johnson’s art. The Turner show, which is the first gallery exhibition of the artist’s work since 1947, begins to unfold the story of an invigorating painter for whom making art was the most potent way to build a life.

* Steve Turner Gallery, 275 S. Beverly Drive, Suite 200, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-3721; through March 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Brain Game: Logic, serial structure, mathematics, order, walnuts.

Walnuts? Walnuts.

The 1972 “Meditation on a Theorem by Pythagoras,” which is included in Grant Selwyn Fine Art’s often bracing show of early and recent work by New York-based Conceptual artist Mel Bochner, is certainly expected to partake of analytical rigors. Bochner is among those artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, labored hard to drain every last drop of an artist’s expressive self from a work of art and then relocate active consciousness squarely in the mind of the viewer. Logic, serial structure and the rest were the devices he marshaled to accomplish the fundamental shift; yet, the whimsical eccentricity of doing it with the aid of a bunch of edible, two-lobed seeds bought by the bag at the grocery store prompts a double-take.

“Meditation on a Theorem by Pythagoras” is a small, precise drawing of a triangle made with white chalk directly on the gallery’s floor. No pedestal or frame elevates or separates the art from the ordinary space a visitor also occupies.

The little triangle is further delineated with walnuts: three lined up along the short side, four along another, five along the third. You can count the abstract measurements and their triangulated relationships through this little assist from nature.

The mathematical abstraction is further extrapolated from two dimensions to three: The walnuts are laid out three, four and five deep on a side, establishing a formal progression in space. Suddenly those two-lobed walnuts begin to look like loopy references to the shape and structure of a human brain.

If you squat down low to examine this floor-bound little assembly of counting tools, you slip into an oddly primitive pose with less than crude implications. The work is a meditation, after all, and Pythagoras was convinced that numbers were the ultimate elements of the universe.

The Greek philosopher also believed in transmigration--that the soul, at death, would pass into another body. In Bochner’s remarkably deft and simple work, the journey follows a different path, going from his head to yours, from the future to the present, from inevitable mortality to the conscious experience of life. Not bad for a handful of walnuts and some chalk.

The most compelling works in the exhibition are those that date from 1966 to 1973, the glory days of Conceptual art. They include a terrific group of physically simple, conceptually rich drawings in the rear gallery, in which ballpoint pen, measuring tape, index cards and graph paper replace more traditional artist’s tools.

The eight recent works, all but one dating from 1999, are less engaging. In some, groups of store-bought, pre-stretched canvases, painted in bright monochrome colors apparently chosen at random are abutted edge to edge in self-enclosed patterns on the wall. The width or height of each canvas is boldly marked on the surface in white paint.

These familiar Duchamp-ian games of measurement, played with ready-made materials, fall flat in the currently invigorated context of painting, which is very different now from what it was 30 years ago. The powerful contextual resonance of Bochner’s earlier work, made when painting seemed to have arrived at the grim and inescapable end of a box canyon, has withered away. Ironically, part of the reason is that the lessons of Conceptual art--Bochner’s included--successfully transformed the landscape of art.

* Grant Selwyn Fine Art, 341 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 777-2400, through March 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Mural Marvel: It’s difficult to imagine a more inhospitable space for art than the grand stairway in the corporate lobby entrance to the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum. All the more reason, then, to marvel at the exuberantly whacked-out mural that San Francisco-based artist Barry McGee has effortlessly painted there, as the latest installment in the new Hammer Projects series.

Part graffiti, part billboard, it reverberates between the private rumination and public shout that graffiti and billboards together constitute. (McGee, 33, is a former teenage tagger.) Blazing red with mostly empty thought-balloon patches of gray and white, it’s peppered with ambiguous, floating, heavy-lidded male heads that seem by turns boozy and forlorn or deliriously blissed out. Dreamy bits of unreadable tagging in elegant, spray-painted black script visually stutter through the emergency-red field.

The passageway into the museum is thus engulfed in a kind of exuberant nausea, if there can be such a thing--which apparently there can, because there it is. The tone of McGee’s mural feels of-the-moment and absolutely right.

The lobby’s nearby gallery features McGee’s tramp-style installation work consisting of several hundred drawings, photographs and ephemera, featuring an assortment of those cartoon-style heads. They also turn up painted on empty liquor bottles, while a wall of stacked spray-paint cans has the look of a skid-row devotional shrine.

The gallery works are less compelling than the racy wall mural across the lobby, perhaps because of their tenuousness and fragility. They look like they could be swept away in a flash; by contrast, the blaring mural manages to sweep away you, your fellow visitors and the abominable architectural environment before you even know what’s hit you.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through June 4. Closed Monday.