Lester Johnson

Lester Johnson, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1919, studied at the Minneapolis School of Art with Alexander Masley, at the St. Paul School of Art with Cameron Booth and later at the Art Institute of Chicago (1942-47). In 1947, he moved to New York City, attended classes at the Hofmann School of Fine Arts and shared a Lower East Side loft with Larry Rivers. Three years later, he shared studio space with Philip Pearlstein. A member of the Eighth Street Club, Johnson had his first solo exhibition in 1951 at the Artist's Gallery. His work of the late 1940s was predominantly pure form or "action painting" with an undertone of content that soon evolved in the mid-1950s into figurative painting. Early figures were dark, anonymous silhouettes, painted thickly with expressive gestural strokes and drips. Over the years, as the process of painting became more of a physical act for Johnson, his style became increasingly free and his emphasis shifted from physical form to the psychological content of his subjects. Johnson was greatly inspired by the movement of the city streets, and particularly the "bums" he watched near his Bowery Street studio. From 1958 to 1959, Johnson taught painting classes and along with Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Bob Thompson, exhibited at City Gallery, an alternative exhibition space opened by Red Grooms and Jay Milder. Throughout the last four decades, Johnson has continued to explore the human condition and in his painting and drawings, he has attempted to "prove that man is more than a man." In 1964, he was appointed Professor of Art at Yale University and from 1969-74, served as Director of Studies for Yale's School of Art and Architecture. In 1966, after relocating to Milford, Connecticut, Johnson experienced a tragic fire in his studio and over six hundred works were destroyed. A recipient of numerous honors of distinction including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting (1973), Johnson was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1987. He lives and works in Connecticut.See also:http://www.procuniarworkshop.com(hardcopy in file)A New York artist, known as a second-generation abstract expressionist, Lester Johnson was born to a large Lutheran family in Minneapolis. He studied at the Minneapolis School of Art and the St. Paul Art School. There he was introduced to Hans Hofmann's teaching approach, particularly the "push and pull" effects of form and color by St. Paul teachers Alexander Masley and Cameron Booth, both of whom had studied with Hofmann in Munich. After further study at the Chicago Art Institute, Johnson moved to New York City in 1947 and became one of the first downtown loft-dwellers. He shared a lower East Side studio with Larry Rivers and attended some of Hofmann's New York classes. Rents were cheap but Johnson was broke much of the time as he tried to support his painting through a variety of part-time jobs, including teaching art. In 1950, he and realist figurative painter Philip Pearlstein shared a studio space. Lester's wife, Jo, had introduced the two artists at a time when she and Pearlstein were studying art history at New York University. Johnson's various studios, on the Bowery and elsewhere, were always one flight up with a view of Manhattan's active street life. No wonder, for over fifty years, street scenes have been a dominant part of his art.Johnson adopted the working techniques of action painting, which meant he used a great deal of paint. A tube of oil paint might be expended in seconds as he, like Pollock, physically projected himself into the work. The images that Johnson produced were not decorative, but stubbornly confrontational: oversize, brooding, thickly encrusted, scarred surfaces that were alive with recognizable objects and figures. Even today, few realize how radical it was for Johnson to depict a recognizable subject in an adamantly pro-abstract-expressionist climate. Sculptor George Segal recalled: "The Abstract Expressionists were legislating any reference to the physical world totally out of art. This was outrageous to us". Rebellion came naturally to Lester Johnson, and he remained tenaciously outside the mainstream. Nonetheless, he produced a body of work that influenced several generations of younger painters and confounded an art establishment in need of neat categorization. He remains one of the few painters whose work holds significance for both abstract and figurative artists. Lester Johnson's animated men and women, with all their nervous energy, yield themselves only gradually to analysis and will no doubt be reinterpreted for many years to come. His largest achievement is perhaps the degree to which each of his works is still able to convince us that the act of painting is relevant and vital. Source: Based on information from article in "Provincetown Arts Magazine," by Burt Chernow, through askart.com