On October 7th, we celebrated the life and times of Sargent Claude Johnson (October 7, 1888 – October 10, 1967); one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation. He was known for Abstract Figurative and Early Modern styles. He was a painter, potter, ceramist, printmaker, graphic artist, sculptor, and carver. He worked with a variety of media, including ceramic, clay, oil, stone, terra-cotta, watercolor, and wood. He was in the Communist Party for most of his life. Sargent Johnson was the third of 10 children, born to a father of Swedish descent and mother of African-American and Cherokee ancestry. In 1902, when his mother died, the boys of the family were sent to an orphanage in Worcester, Massachusetts and the girls to a Catholic school for African-American and Native American girls in Pennsylvania. At a young age, Sargent and his siblings went to live with their uncle, Sherman Jackson Williams, and his wife, May Howard Jackson. May was a famous black sculptor specializing in Negro themes and undoubtedly she influenced Sargent Johnson at an early age. Apparently some of his siblings had troubles with identifying themselves as African-American and chose to live as either Native Americans or Caucasians, though Sargent lived his life as an African-American without a doubt. Johnson’s transition from practicing artist to professional is largely undocumented, though some say he left from Boston to Chicago to live with some relatives. In 1915 Sargent Johnson moved to the San Francisco Bay area. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which had a stimulating influence on California art, took place shortly after his move. The same year, Sargent Johnson married Pearl Lawson and began studying drawing and painting at the A. W. Best School of Art. He attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1919 to 1923, where his teachers included the sculptors Beniamino Bufano and Ralph Stackpole. Consuelo Kanaga, a photographer of that time, knew him well and said of Johnson, “He was beautiful in his spirit, the way he talked, the way he thought, the way he worked, the way he felt. I don’t mean he didn’t have problems. He did – terrible problems – but he was still beautiful. It was his spirit, the way he looked at everything. Johnson produced witty, sophisticated work that ranges from jaunty interpretations of African masks to lithographs to small scale figures. Sargent Johnson began showing his work with the Harmon Foundation of New York in 1926. Through this distinguished foundation that supported African-American art, he exhibited many of his pieces and became locally and then nationally known. “The Harmon Foundation and the commission on the church and race relations of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America have placed this exhibit before the public in hope of accomplishing three things: Creating a wider interest in the work of the Race artist as a contribution to American Culture; stimulating him to aim for the highest standards of achievement, and encouraging the general public in the purchase of his work with the eventual purpose in view of helping the American Negro to a sounder and more satisfactory economic position in art. There was a total of 87 pieces displayed at the show and a $150 prize for most outstanding work went to Johnson, “showing a porcelain head of a Negro child, “Pearl,” and two drawings, one of which, “Defiant,” is massively constructed and as simple in its planes as is so much of the modern Mexican work. He was usually not included in as “American art” because of how his pieces ignored traditional western techniques and was inspired by foreign cultures, such as Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqeiros and others. Johnson and his wife separated in 1936. Pearl Adele, his only child, remained in the care of her mother. The mother was hospitalized in 1947, and she passed away in Stockton State Hospital in 1964. Johnson visited her regularly while she was institutionalized. Johnson’s early works are portraits and busts of those who were around him or works fashioned after ideas affecting his own life. His work gained recognition in a local exhibition in 1925. In the late 1930s, Sargent Johnson commissioned his work with the Federal Arts Project (FAP). As a member of the bohemian San Francisco Bay community and influenced by the New Negro Movement, Sargent Johnsons early work focused on racial identity. Johnson said, “It is the pure American Negro I am concerned with, aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip and that characteristic hair, bearing, and manner; and I wish to show that beauty not so much to the white man as to the Negro himself. Unless I can interest my race, I am sunk.” According to Johnson, Negroes are a colorful race; they call for an art as colorful as they can be made. Beginning in 1945, and continuing through 1965, Sargent Johnson made a number of trips to Oaxaca and Southern Mexico and started incorporating the people and culture, particularly archaeology, into his work. Other subjects included African-American figures, animals, and Native Americans. On February 23, 2010, Swann Galleries auctioned Sargent Claude Johnson’s Untitled (Standing Woman), a painted terra cotta sculpture, c. 1933-35, for $52,800 - an auction record at the time for the artist. In 2009 the University of California, Berkeley unwittingly sold a work by Johnson for $164.63, that was later valued at more than a million dollars. The 22-foot carved redwood relief panel was eventually purchased by the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA and will be displayed in its new American wing.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 11:45:47 +0000
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