William H. Johnson

William Henry Johnson was born on the eighteenth of March 1901 at Florence, South Carolina, the eldest of five children of Henry Johnson, who worked as a fireman for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, and Alice Smoot, a cook and domestic worker. A gifted childhood copyist of newspaper cartoons, he left the segregated South around 1918 for Harlem, and in 1921 enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where he studied under the painter Charles Webster Hawthorne, who prized color above all.

When Johnson was denied a traveling scholarship, Hawthorne financed a study trip abroad, judging that his protege would meet less prejudice in Europe. He painted in Paris and settled at Cagnes-sur-Mer in southern France, absorbing the lessons of modernism. In 1930 he married the Danish textile artist Holcha Krake, and the couple lived and worked in Scandinavia, where the region's living folk-art traditions began to reshape his eye.

Returning to the United States in 1938, Johnson taught at the Harlem Community Art Center under the Federal Art Project and forged the bold, flat, brilliantly colored folk style for which he is best remembered. In these years he painted African American life, labor, worship, and history with tender directness. The death of Holcha from cancer in 1944 broke him; failing health led to his hospitalization from 1947, and he made no further art.

Johnson died on the thirteenth of April 1970 at Central Islip, New York. More than eleven hundred of his works were preserved and now anchor the Smithsonian American Art Museum. May the hand that dignified his people in color be remembered with honor.