Lot 248
Lester Frederick Johnson
Connecticut, New York, (1919 - 2010)
portrait of a man, 1961
pastel and charcoal on paper
signed and dated lower right.
Biography from the Archives of askART: Following is The New York Times obituary of Lester Johnson.
"Lester Johnson, Expressionist Painter, Dies at 91"
By William Grimes
June 8, 2010
Lester Johnson, an admired artist whose expressionist brushwork lent vigor and force to the human figure — isolated and embattled, or alive with the joy of movement in crowds — died on May 30. He was 91 and lived in Southampton on Long Island.
His death, at a nursing home in Westhampton, N.Y., was confirmed by his son, Anthony.
Mr. Johnson, a maverick associate of the Abstract Expressionists in New York, found his subject matter in the joys and sorrows of ordinary people on the street. His boxy figures of the 1960s, somberly painted in thick impasto their features often scratched into the surface, faced the viewer squarely with an air of stoicism or grim defiance.
Some were self-portraits. Others, such as Bowery Patriarch (1963) and Three Men Sitting (1969), enlisted the stumbling, broken men he saw on the Bowery from his second-floor studio window.
Pulsing with a dark energy and compressed into taut masses by brutal external forces, Mr. Johnson's subjects, presented singly or in groups, seemed like hostages to fate. The art critic Harold Rosenberg called them "golem-like," a reference to the manlike creature of Jewish folklore created from inanimate matter. "Johnson's grim dolls seem to push forward out of a background darkness which they bring with them to the painting surface," he wrote in Art News in 1966.
In the 1970s, Mr. Johnson shifted gears. "I get into a theme, and I get into it until I don't like it," he told The Hartford Courant in 2005. He began painting women in colorful print dresses and men wearing bowler hats, crowding the canvas and moving ebulliently through the city's streets. Their flattened, stylized forms, and the often frieze-like arrangement of the figures, suggested Greek vase art set to a jazz soundtrack. "It was a real pleasure to use color," he told The Courant. "From then on, I had another world."
"If there is such as thing as the poetry of congestion, Mr. Johnson invented it," John Russell wrote in The New York Times in 1977. "The people in his painting just love company. They can't get enough of it. No matter how he packs them in we feel that both he and they would gladly find room for someone else."
Lester Frederick Johnson was born on Jan. 27, 1919, in Minneapolis. After graduating from high school he began an apprenticeship at the Cosmopolitan Art Company, where he learned to make frames and copy calendar landscapes.
Determined to become a fine artist, he enrolled at the Minneapolis School of Art, where he studied with Alexander Masley, a former student of Hans Hofmann in Munich.
When Mr. Masley was dismissed because of political infighting at the school, Mr. Johnson moved to the St. Paul School of Art to study with another Hofmann protégé, Cameron Booth. He later studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1947 he moved to New York, where he shared a studio, at different times, with Larry Rivers and Philip Pearlstein. Two years later he married Josephine Valenti, who survives him. In addition to his son, an architect who lives in Manhattan, he is survived by his daughter, Leslie Lowery, of Greenwich, Conn., and four grandchildren.
Mr. Johnson started out painting small urban landscapes and abstract paintings but gradually moved toward the human figure, developing a style heavily influenced by the painterly techniques of the Abstract Expressionists and the existential atmosphere in the Giacometti paintings he saw in a show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1948.
What he took from Giacometti, the critic Hilton Kramer noted in a 2004 review of Mr. Johnson's work in The New York Observer was not a style but "an attitude of interrogation and anxiety in dealing with the figure."
He became one of the figurative artists voted into the Eighth Street Club, the famous weekly gathering of the Abstract Expressionists. They regarded him as talented but misguided. He regarded drips and gestural brushstrokes as an avant-garde signature that could easily descend into empty cliché.
"I was into human content and I used it, and I found it a very, very exciting thing to do," Mr. Johnson said in an interview in 1988. "I did a lot of paintings at the time where you can hardly see the figure, but it's there."
He had his first solo show at the Artists Gallery in 1951.
In 1964, Jack Tworkov, the chairman of the graduate art department at Yale, recommended Mr. Johnson for a job. He taught figure drawing at Yale until his retirement in 1989, and from 1969 to 1974 was the director of studies for the graduate painting program.
The James Goodman Gallery in Manhattan surveyed his work in 2004 in the exhibition "Lester Johnson: Four Decades of Painting." In 2005, the University of Connecticut in Storrs mounted a 50-year retrospective of his work, "People Passing By: Paintings, Drawings and Prints by Lester Johnson," at the William Benton Museum of Art.
Correction:
An obituary on June 9 about the painter Lester Johnson erroneously credited him with a distinction. Several figurative artists — not just Mr. Johnson — were members of the salon known as the Eighth Street Club. (Among them were Larry Rivers and Edwin Dickinson.)
- Dimensions: 19 5/8" x 12 3/4", 22 3/8" x 15 1/2" (frame)
- Medium: pastel and charcoal on paper
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