Lester Johnson
Lester Johnson (American, 1919-2010) Collection currently available at the Michigan Art Gallery.
Born in 1919, Johnson was determined to become a fine artist, he enrolled at the Minneapolis School of Art, where he studied with Alexander Masley, a former student of Hans Hofmann in Munich. When Mr. Masley was dismissed because of political infighting at the school, Mr. Johnson moved to the St. Paul School of Art to study with another Hofmann protégé, Cameron Booth. He later studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mr. Johnson started out painting small urban landscapes and abstract paintings but gradually moved toward the human figure, developing a style heavily influenced by the painterly techniques of the Abstract Expressionists and the existential atmosphere in the Giacometti paintings he saw in a show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1948.
What he took from Giacometti, the critic Hilton Kramer noted in a 2004 review of Mr. Johnson’s work in The New York Observer, was not a style but “an attitude of interrogation and anxiety in dealing with the figure.”
He became one of the figurative artists voted into the Eighth Street Club, the famous weekly gathering of the Abstract Expressionists. They regarded him as talented but misguided. He regarded drips and gestural brushstrokes as an avant-garde signature that could easily descend into empty cliché.
He had his first solo show at the Artists Gallery in 1951. In 1964, Johnson was invited by Abstract Expressionist painter Jack Tworkov to teach at Yale, where he served as the Director of Studies Graduate Painting from 1969 to 1974. Johnson retired from teaching at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1989.
In New York, Johnson exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery, Zabriskie Gallery, Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer, and James Goodman Gallery. He has also been exhibited at several museums, including group shows at the Solomon R. 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. Throughout his career, Lester exhibited extensively with Donald Morris Gallery in Detroit, Michigan and with David Klein Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan.
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