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 — a Black labourer of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad shops — and Alice Johnson, a domestic. He was raised in the small Black tenant community of Florence under the closing years of the Plessy-era South Carolina.

He was placed at six at the Florence Coloured Schools and left school at the eighth grade to support the family. He moved at seventeen to Manhattan in 1918 on the eight dollars he had saved across two years.

He took employment at New York in the closing years of the 1910s as a stevedore at the New York Harbor, a porter at the Pennsylvania Station, and a hotel-cleaner at Manhattan hotels — and saved the small wages to enrol in 1921 at twenty at the National Academy of Design at Manhattan. He completed the National Academy four-year course in 1926 and was awarded the Cannon Prize of the Academy in 1924, the William Edwards Painting Prize in 1925, and the Hallgarten Prize in 1926. He was the only Black student in his graduating class.

He relocated to Paris in October 1926 on a Cannon Prize travelling fellowship and to Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Mediterranean coast in 1927, where he lived for two years and met the Danish weaver Holcha Krake — whom he married at Aalborg, Denmark on the twenty-fourth of May 1930.

He lived from 1930 to 1938 at the Scandinavian peninsula — at Kerteminde on the Funen coast of Denmark, at Volda in western Norway, and at Stockholm — across which he absorbed the post-Edvard-Munch Expressionist colour and brushwork that became the principal pictorial vocabulary of his mature career.

He returned to Harlem in 1938 at thirty-seven at the rise of the Nazi territorial threat to Scandinavia, and entered the United States Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration at Harlem as a teacher of painting at the Harlem Community Art Center under Augusta Savage (placed in this archive).

He completed across the following nine years the principal portion of his mature career — over two thousand works in oil, watercolour, gouache and silk-screen — in a flattened, planar, colour-saturated style of figurative simplicity. The principal series of the Harlem period are the Harlem Genre paintings (1939–1942), the Soldier paintings (1942–1945), the Negro Folk Heroes series (1945, including the John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and the Underground Railroad paintings), and the Negro War paintings of 1944.

He was struck in October 1947 with paresis — the tertiary stage of the syphilitic dementia that had been incubating in him for over twenty years — and was institutionalised at the Central Islip State Hospital at Long Island for the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He never painted after the institutionalisation.

He died at the Central Islip State Hospital on the thirteenth of April 1970 of complications of dementia, at sixty-nine. The principal portion of his Harlem-period work was rescued in 1956 from a warehouse-destruction order by the Harmon Foundation.

He is honored here as the painter of the Harlem Negro Folk Heroes series.