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William H. Johnson was truly an exceptional artist in the
1930s — an African-American painter and printmaker who
embraced modern art while living in France, North Africa
and Scandinavia. These four woodblock prints (lots 15-18)
by William H. Johnson were recently re-discovered in an
old suitcase in a Danish attic. Found by descendants of his
Danish wife, Holcha Krake, they belong to Johanna Voll,
the granddaughter of the German Expressionist artist
Christoph Voll.
The woodcuts are from a body of work that Johnson made
in Denmark in the early 1930s when he and his wife first
moved to Scandinavia. Johnson was influenced by the
woodcuts of Edvard Munch; Johnson, in fact, met the famous
Norwegian artist in Oslo in the spring of 1935. Johnson did
not make prints in an edition and printed only small numbers
— just a few proof impressions are known of each woodcut
he produced. Their uneven inking indicates they likely were
printed by hand — Johnson is not known to have worked
with a press. He would often color them with watercolor.
Johnson’s woodcuts today are very rare — only two have
been recorded recently at auction — outside of museum
collections. The majority of the surviving prints, including
approximately 50 different woodblock images, were
distributed by the Harmon Foundation of New York to
institutional collections in the late 1940s. Their primary
repository today is the collection of the Smithsonian
Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. In 2007, the
Philadelphia Museum of Art showed a large group of his
prints in the exhibition
William H. Johnson's World on Paper
,
including about 24 woodcuts.
WILLIAM H. JOHNSON (1901 - 1970)