Lester Johnson
Frontal Street Scene

Name: Frontal Street Scene
Brand: Lester Johnson
Price: 1400 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

This lithograph is immediately identifiable as the work of Lester Johnson (1919-2010) . The print is titled “Frontal Street Scene.” It was published in 1970 by Collector’s Press. The print is signed in the lower right, titled in the lower center and numbered “Bon a tirer” in the lower left. The print measures 22 x 30 inches and is on Arches paper. It is in excellent, never framed condition. Here are some details about the print: Marks: Lower left blindstamp -- mark of Ernest DeSoto, the printer Lower left blindstamp -- mark of Collector's Press I am not certain of the size of the edition. It could be as small as 20 plus proofs, based on an image from the Provincetown Art Association, which also owns this print. About the artist: Lester Johnson (January 27, 1919 – May 30, 2010) was an American artist. He was a figurative expressionist and member of the Second Generation of the New York School. The subject of much of his work was the human figure. In New York, Johnson exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery, Zabriskie Gallery, Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer, and James Goodman Gallery as well as having been included in group shows at the Guggenheim, The Whitney, Museum of Modern Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was elected a member to both the American Academy of Arts & Letters and National Academy of Design. Johnson lived and worked in New York City (on the Bowery), Springs, Milford (CT), Greenwich (CT), and Southampton, NY. Lester Johnson was born in 1919 in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the youngest of seven and grandchild of Swedish homesteaders. In 1947, after studying at the Minneapolis School of Art, and the St. Paul Art School, he came to New York City. He shared a home with Larry Rivers. He married Josephine Valenti, an art historian, in 1949, and moved into a house on 2nd Ave and 2nd Street – which was shared with Wolf Kahn. After moving uptown, he continued to work downtown. In 1961, he briefly left the city for an artist-in-residence position at Ohio State. After returning, and while sharing a studio with Philip Pearlstein, he was invited by Jack Tworkov to teach at Yale. He accepted and was a professor at Yale from 1964 until 1989. Awards and Prizes: 2004 Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters 2003 American Academy of Arts and Letters, Jimmy Ernst Award 1987 Elected Associate, National Academy of Design 1987 Brandeis University, Creative Arts Award for Painting 1973 Guggenheim Fellowship 1961 Longview Fellowship Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1942 Midwestern Artists Competition 1st prize 1941 St. Paul Gallery Scholarship 1940–41 The President’s Scholarship Minneapolis School of Fine Arts 1939 Alfred Pillsbury Scholarship Selected Public Collections Baltimore Museum of Art Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Institute of Chicago Detroit Institute of Arts Kalamazoo Institute of Arts Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Minneapolis Institute of Arts The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven Museum of Modern Art, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Creator:

Lester Johnson (1919 - 2010, American)

Dimensions:

Height: 22 in (55.88 cm)Width: 30 in (76.2 cm)Depth: 0.1 in (2.54 mm)

Medium:

Lithograph

Movement & Style:

Expressionist

Period:

1970-1979

Condition:

The print is in very good, never-framed condition.

Gallery Location:

San Francisco, CA

Reference Number:

Seller: PM02202020-21stDibs: LU66635760421

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Lester Johnson

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 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 50 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." The 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. 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.