Lot Details
Lot 1287
William H. Johnson
American, 1901-1970
Untitled (Street in Cagnes-sur-Mer)
Oil on canvas
28 x 23 1/8 inches
The paintings that American modernist William H. Johnson created during his 1928-29 stay in the south of France possess a pictorial richness and sophistication all their own. "The artistic criteria that governed Johnson's creative aspirations in his expatriate period were those of the European modern movement," noted art critic Hilton Kramer on the occasion of a major Johnson exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In works like Untitled (Street in Cagnes-sur-Mer) Johnson revealed his affinity for that era's figurative expressionists, especially the legendary painter Chaim Soutine. Rather than simply emulating Soutine, Johnson personalized his distortions, turning assorted towns along the Riviera into a perceptual tumble of architecture, terrain and sky. (Richard J. Powell, Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, 1991; and Hilton Kramer, "Whitney's P.C. Obsession Lands the Wrong Johnson," New York Observer, 24 August 1992.)
Johnson's Cagnes-sur-Mer paintings appear as if created with the aid of a concave looking-glass. Like its companion works in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and other major art museums, Untitled (Street in Cagnes-sur-Mer) includes wispy, paint-brimmed brushstrokes which denote clouds, shuttered windows, and cobblestone-traipsing pedestrians. Despite Johnson's reality-bending technique, architectural features like attached exterior staircases, shingled rooftops, and multi-storied towers clearly identified these picturesque scenes as characteristically Provencal.
Untitled (Street in Cagnes-sur-Mer) was probably first exhibited at the Galerie Alban in nearby Nice in the spring of 1929. Described in a period art review (unknown newspaper, Nice, France, circa Spring 1929, cited in George Avril, "Art et Lettres: La Peinture a la Galerie Alban") as embodying "un rythme personnel des courbes inattendues" ("a personal rhythm from unexpected curves"), Johnson's French canvases reflected his American joie de vivre and swift conversion to painterly modernism. This departure from academic conventions was crucial. Not only did it change his aesthetic sensibilities at this early juncture in his professional life, but it irrevocably catapulted him into the artistic vanguard. Never afraid "to exaggerate a contour, a form, or anything that gives more character and movement to the canvas," Johnson discovered in his Cagnes-sur-Mer paintings an artistic freedom that would continue for the rest of his short but amazing career. (William H. Johnson, letter to Charles W. Hawthorne, 13 August 1928, Charles W. Hawthorne Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.)
We kindly thank Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University for this catalogue entry.
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