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| Sargent Claude Johnson, Stage Proscenium, 1937. University of California, Berkeley |
In the 1930s Alain Locke wrote that Sargent Claude Johnson (1888-1967) "had come to reflect more than any other contemporary Negro sculptor the modernist mode and the African influence." Arguably the most successful Black sculptor of his time, Johnson's national reputation all but vanished after his death. The Huntington's "Sargent Claude Johnson" is the first such single-artist show in a generation. It assembles 43 works by the Bay Area artist who synthesized such eclectic influences as Africa and Art Deco.
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| Sargent Claude Johnson, Esther, about 1929. San Diego Museum of Art |
Johnson was born in Boston to a Black and Cherokee mother and a Swedish father. He moved to the Bay Area in 1915, where he studied art. Sargent made his name with serene terracotta portrait heads of young people of color, recalling Ife heads from ancient Nigeria. The precursor of the San Diego Museum of Art was the first institution to buy a Johnson sculpture. His work is primarily found in West Coast institutions, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art above all.
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| Sargent Claude Johnson, Forever Free, 1933. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art |
Los Angeles did not acquire it first Johnson until 1997, when a donor gave LACMA
a version of the artist's most popular portrait, Chester. Despite the esteem of Locke and other Harlem Renaissance figures, New York museums ignored Johnson. The Whitney and MoMA still have nothing by the artist, and the Met has only prints. (The Met's current "Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism" show has a Johnson on loan from Boston.)
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| Portrait heads |
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| Sargent Claude Johnson, Organ Screen, 1933-34. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens |
At the depth of the Depression the Works Progress Administration commissioned Johnson to create redwood reliefs for the California School for the Blind. In 2009 Berkeley inexplicably sold one relief for a pittance ($164.63!) Two years later the Huntington acquired it. The exhibition reunites the Huntington
Organ Screen with other surviving components of the commission. Most spectacular is a
Proscenium Stage (top of post) created a few years after the Huntington carving. In this commission Johnson may have been inspired by the Art Deco interiors of Templeton Crocker's San Francisco home, designed by Jean Dunand.
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| Sargent Claude Johnson, Three Window Lunettes, 1933-34. Left and right: California School for the Blind. Center: African American Museum and Library at Oakland |
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| Sargent Claude Johnson, Lovers, 1935-40. M. Hanks Gallery |
Johnson was comfortable working on scales from inches to colossal. Individual works in the show recall John Flannagan and even Jared French.
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| Sargent Claude Johnson, Preparatory Drawing for the George Washington High School Athletics Mural, 1940. Family of John and Margery Magnani |
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| Sargent Claude Johnson, Self-Portrait, about 1950s. University of Arizona Museum of Art |
Despite high-profile public and private commissions that few artists of color achieved—including mosaics for Hawaiian cruise ships and an enamel sign for a Reno casino—Johnson's life appears to have been a constant struggle. He never made a secure living from his art, surviving on a succession of side hustles. His wife left him because he didn't earn enough money. Johnson struggled with alcohol and died in a residential hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin.
Late in life Johnson explored enamel as a durable form of painting. An enamel-on-steel self-portrait shows a brown-skinned figure putting on a mask, with a shadow behind it. The gallery label quotes W.E.B Du Bois: "It is is peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others… One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body."
"Sargent Claude Johnson" is in the Boone Gallery through May 20, 2024.
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| Detail of Stage Proscenium |
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