Contribution to Book
The Aesthetics of Transcendence: William H. Johnson's Jesus and the Three Marys
Beholding Christ and Christianity in African-American Art
(2017)
Abstract
William H. Johnson (1901-1970) was a modern African-American painter, whose peripatetic style ranged from Academic realism to gestural abstraction. In the 1930s and early 1940s, during which he divided his time between Denmark and New York, Johnson worked on canvases best characterized as Expressionist: saturated colors, abstracted forms, and flattened spaces. This essay considers Johnson’s Expressionism, specifically manifest in his paintings of biblical subjects created in New York, within the critical discourse of Expressionism that came to define this heterogeneous movement of European modernism. Johnson’s abstracted portrayals of biblical subjects, including Jesus and the Three Marys (1939), invite comparison to two critical texts of German provenance that shaped discussions of Expressionism in the early twentieth century. Wilhelm Worringer’s terse volume on Abstraction and Empathy, first published in 1908, offered an art historical justification for Expressionism through what he called a “psychology of style.” Similarly Gustav Hartlaub’s Art and Religion, published in 1919, attempted to account for a “new religious art” in the proliferation of mostly biblical themes in pre-war and wartime works by artists now associated with German Expressionism. By considering, however, Johnson’s Expressionism within the theoretical frameworks that conditioned an ethnocentric understanding of this modern style, this essay will raise knotted questions about the rhetoric of the “primitive” in Expressionist discourse and, in so doing, attempt to unseat certain assumptions about black art, religious art, and modern art.
Keywords
- William H. Johnson,
- Expressionism,
- Abstraction,
- African American Art,
- Modernism
Disciplines
Publication Date
August 11, 2017
Editor
James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill
Publisher
Penn State University Press
ISBN
978-0-271-07774-1
Citation Information
Amy K Hamlin. "The Aesthetics of Transcendence: William H. Johnson's Jesus and the Three Marys" 1State College, PennsylvaniaBeholding Christ and Christianity in African-American Art (2017) p. 75 - 85 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/akhamlin/4/