Lester Johnson Figurative Paintings

Lester Johnson "Head with Plant" 1959 oil on paper. Early figurative expressionist painting on paper. Nicely framed.

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY “Untitled” painted in India Ink of two heads was done during what has been call Lester Johnson’s Dark Paintings of the 1960s. In 2013 John Yau wrote with much insight about that period of Johnson’s work - “Lester Johnson (1919-2010) was an innovative figurative painter who has never quite fit into any of the accepted narratives of postwar American art, and that alone makes his work worthy of a longer look. The 1960s was an explosively turbulent era marked by assassinations, race riots, space flights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ first American tours, and the rapidly escalating Vietnam War. Everyone was wary and on edge. Meanwhile, in the New York art world, all eyes were fixated on the rise and triumph of Pop Art, Minimalism and Color Field painting. Johnson was one of the few artists that attuned to the dismay that everyone was feeling during the violent and schizophrenic time, the sense that it could all come crashing down. However, his work was never overtly political or didactic. While his dark, brooding, monochromatic paintings of anonymous men gained a small and loyal following, they also became part of that largely invisible history of a time when New York was a tough scary and exciting place to be. More than fifty years after they were made, Johnson’s Dark Paintings continue to retain a coarseness that we associate with gestural Abstract Expressionism and Jean Dubuffet’s anti-psychological, anti-personal portraits incorporating sand and gravel. One sees in them the antecedents of Joyce Pensato’s gestural exaggerations of Groucho Marx, Homer Simpson and Minnie Mouse. While Pensato brings an infectious humor to her work, Johnson was more somber. I cannot help but think that both these artists chose their bedraggled subjects out of empathy and a trace of identification.” Lester Johnson, was born in 1919 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended Minneapolis School of Art, where he studied under Alexander Masley who was a former student of Hans Hofmann. Johnson continued his artistic career in New York City where he opened his first studio on 6th and Avenue A. His neighbor there was fellow painter Wolf Kahn. During his time there he would share a loft with Larry Rivers and married the art historian Josephine Valenti. In 1961 he briefly taught at Ohio State University before returning to New York City to share a studio with Philip Pearlstein. Jack Tworkov would invite Johnson to teach at Yale, an offer that Lester Johnson would accept and spend the rest of his life in Connecticut. Johnson passed away in 2010. Johnson's work has been exhibited in the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Walker Art Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This work has been framed inside of a custom frame with museum glass...

Ink and spray enamel on paper. Signed "Lester Johnson" and dated "1968" lower right recto. Provenance: Martha Jackson Gallery