A Taste of Harlem Featured At Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

Written by Raymond Kozlowski Tuesday, 17 May 2011 20:46

Montgomery, AL — Experience the vitality and energy sparked by the jazz, blues, art, and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts September 15 through November 18 during the exhibition of William H. Johnson’s World on Paper. Johnson expressed Harlem’s blues and jazz culture in many of his paintings, featuring bold compositions and bright colors. His works are recognized today as a major achievement of African-American expression.

Born in South Carolina in 1901 to a poor African-American family, William Henry Johnson moved to New York at age seventeen. He saved money for art lessons at the National Academy of Design where he mastered its rigorous standards and won numerous awards and the respect of fellow students and teachers. Johnson spent the late 1920s in France studying the techniques of modernism. There he met and later married the Danish artist Holcha Krake. During the 1930s they lived in Scandinavia where Johnson’s interest in folk expression in art began to influence his work. After the couple moved to the United States in 1938, Johnson began depicting his rural South Carolina family and their community in brightly colored paintings with simplified form and minimal detail. Johnson and Holcha settled in New York where African-American culture remained charged with the energy sparked by the 1920s flowering of artistic expression known as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Johnson expressed the vitality of the Harlem community and its blues and jazz culture in many of his paintings. After his wife died in 1944, Johnson’s mental health declined dramatically.

This exhibition includes a retrospective survey of 70 prints representing all periods of the artist’s career. Over a thousand paintings and drawings by Johnson are now part of the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This selection of rarely-exhibited prints by the artist (also in the Smithsonian’s collection) reveals him to be as powerful with graphic media as with oils and tempera. Its images range from landscapes of Scandinavia and cityscapes in France to Southern cotton patches and Harlem streets of post-Depression America.

William H. Johnson’s World on Paper is organized and circulated by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition’s tour is supported in part by the C.F. Foundation, Atlanta. In Montgomery, the exhibition is sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Summit America Capital.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sunday Noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free and donations are welcome. For more information, call the MMFA at 334.240.4333 or visit the website at www.mmfa.org .