SPARTANBURG, SC.- The Johnson Collection, in collaboration with the University of South Carolina Press, announces the publication of From New York to Nebo: The Artistic Journey of Eugene Thomason. Featuring 47 color illustrations, the book tells the story of how one Carolina artist translated an early twentieth century urban art movement for the Southern vernacular.

A product of the industrialized New South, Eugene Healan Thomason (1895–1972) made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York to advance his art education and launch his career. Like so many other aspiring American artists, he understood that the city offered unparalleled personal and professional opportunities—prestigious schools, groundbreaking teachers, and an intoxicating cosmopolitan milieu—for a promising young painter in the early 1920s. The patronage of one of the nation’s most powerful tycoons afforded him entrance to the renowned Art Students League, where he fell under the influence of the leading members of the Ashcan School: Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Luks. In all, Thomason spent a decade in the city, adopting—and eventually adapting—the Ashcan movement’s gritty realistic aesthetic into a distinctive regionalist style that utilized thick paint and simple subject matter.

Thomason returned to the South in the early 1930s, living first in Charlotte, North Carolina, before settling in a small Appalachian crossroads called Nebo. For the next thirty-plus years, Thomason mined the rural landscape’s rolling terrain and area residents for inspiration, finding there an abundance of colorful imagery more evocative—and more personally resonant—than the urbanism of New York. Painting at the same time as such well known Regionalists as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Eugene Thomason embraced and convincingly portrayed his own region, becoming the visual spokesman for that place and its people.

Located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the Johnson Collection is the repository of the largest single body of Eugene Thomason’s work. What began as an interest in paintings by Carolina artists in 2002 has grown to encompass over one thousand objects with provenances that span the centuries and chronicle the cultural evolution of the American South. Today, the Johnson Collection counts iconic masterworks among its holdings, as well as representative pieces by a depth and breadth of artists, native and visiting, whose lives and legacies form the foundation of the field of Southern art history. The collection actively seeks to advance interest in the pivotal role that art of the South plays in the larger context of American art and to contribute to the canon of art historical literature. The collection’s first scholarly book, Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings of the South, was published in November 2012, and its companion exhibition is presently on a three-year tour to leading museums across the Southeast.

Martha R. Severens is a graduate of Wells College in Aurora, New York, and holds a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. An art historian, she has served as curator at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and the Greenville (S.C.) County Museum of Art. She has published studies on a variety of Southern artists, including Charles Fraser, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, William Halsey, and Mary Whyte. In addition she is the author of Andrew Wyeth: America's Painter, Greenville County Museum of Art: The Southern Collection, and The Charleston Renaissance.