PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The career of William H. Johnson (1901–1970) was one of the most brilliant yet tragic of any early 20th-century American artist. Best known for his lively paintings of the African American experience in the rural South and urban North, Johnson was also an accomplished printmaker and watercolorist whose style shifted from dramatic expressionism to what he termed a more "primitive" approach using bright and contrasting colors and flattened, two-dimensional forms. William H. Johnson's World on Paper examines, for the first time, his achievements as a graphic artist. Delicate watercolor drawings, bold woodcut prints, and colorful screenprints reveal him as an inventive modernist.

The exhibition, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from May 19 through August 12, 2007, is drawn largely from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the largest and most extensive holding of Johnson's work in all mediums.

"William H. Johnson's legacy of paintings, prints and drawings reveals a sophisticated, avant-garde artist whose work combined the subtleties of his hero, Henry Ossawa Tanner, with European-inspired modernism, and African American folk art," said Anne d'Harnoncourt, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "We are delighted that the exhibition affords the chance to display the rare and spectacular group of prints by William H. Johnson that recently entered the Museum's permanent collection in context with the wonderful prints, drawings and watercolors from the Smithsonian American Art Museum."

Born in 1901 in Florence, S.C., to a poor family, Johnson moved to New York at age 17, just in time for the first flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. Working a variety of jobs, he saved enough money to pay for an art education at the prestigious National Academy of Design. Johnson worked with painter Charles Hawthorne, who raised funds to send Johnson abroad to study. He spent the late 1920s in France, absorbing the lessons of modernism. During this period, he married Danish artist Holcha Krake. The couple spent most of the 1930s in Scandinavia, where Johnson's interest in folk art had a profound impact on his work. Returning with Holcha to the United States in 1938, Johnson immersed himself in African American culture and traditions. Although Johnson attained some success as an artist in this country and abroad, financial security remained elusive. Following his wife's death in 1944, Johnson's physical and mental health deteriorated; he spent the final 23 years of his life in obscurity, confined to a state hospital in Long Island, N.Y.

More than 40 woodcuts and screenprints, together with selected drawings and watercolors, provide an overview of Johnson's career, both in Europe in the 1930s and in New York in the 1940s. Among the varied subjects of his work are early landscapes of Denmark, Norway, and North Africa; portraits of his neighbors in Denmark; scenes of daily life in Harlem and the rural South; and scenes of black enlisted men and female volunteers of World War II. The exhibition reveals Johnson's stylistic development from his academic beginnings to a more expressionistic mode and finally to his distinctive form of figurative abstraction based on folk art and African colors and patterns.

While in Europe, Johnson came in contact with the art of Edvard Munch, whose rough-gouged experimental woodcuts seem to have inspired Johnson to try new printmaking techniques. The unevenly inked black areas in some of the artist's woodblock prints, such as "Jon Fisherman (2)," suggest that Johnson did not use a printing press but instead applied pressure to the back of the paper with the bowl of a spoon or the heel of his hand to transfer the wet ink from the block to the paper.

Back in the United States in the late 1930s Johnson continued to make woodcuts while at the same time he was attracted to the screenprint technique. A stencil method developed in the 1920s for printing signboards and posters, in the 1930s the screenprint was adopted by artists to make limited edition prints. It was as a screenprint artist that Johnson would leave his most lasting mark as a printmaker. The bright-hued, opaque inks and the hand cut stencils used for making screenprints proved to be ideal for translating the sharp edges and flat expanses of his new painting style, which appears to have been inspired in equal parts by the colorful cartoons of his childhood, the folk art of Scandinavia and North Africa, and the African American folk traditions of his own country.

William H. Johnson's World on Paper is organized and circulated by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition's tour is supported in part by the C.F. Foundation, Atlanta, and the William R. Kenan, Jr., Endowment Fund.

Itinerary - An exhibition of more than 40 prints was on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (July 1, 2006 through Jan. 7, 2007). An expanded version of the exhibition that includes selected drawings and watercolors will tour to the Amon Carter Museum in Forth Worth, Texas (Feb. 3–April 8, 2007), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (May 19–Aug. 12, 2007) and the Montgomery Museum of Art, in Montgomery, Ala. (Sept. 15–Nov. 18, 2007).