… The world that Johnson painted in Florence that year – a supernaturally colored domain comprised of regal, yet humble, black women installed on porches, children at play and at rest, and flowers in riotous, full bloom – was, at once, familiar and outlandish, connecting the artist to the ultimate locus of origin: mother; while envisioning that same, fundamental life source within a part cultural, part invented space of impromptu games, performed rituals, imparted legacies, and constantly changing scenery. Like the “too-big-to-be-breast-fed” child in Johnson’s Maternal, the artist returned in 1944 to the comforting, all embracing arms of home, partaking of not only the emotional sustenance of the female element, but of the vertigo-inducing experience of self-consciousness, of finally grasping one’s purpose in life even if it meant the proverbial reentry into the symbolic womb: in this instance, Johnson’s primal, African American folk roots. Although it was practically second nature for this Expressionist to feel his way through the world, and to visually cast it in the operative role of emotional vehicle for his art, it was another matter altogether for the bereft and distraught Johnson to totally immerse himself in the maternal lap and bosom of Alice/Florence, and to transform his temporary asylum and sanctuary into a new and, arguably, more honest mode of modern painting.
“Trembling Vistas, Primal Youth: William H. Johnson’s Painterly Expressionism, 1927-1935” and “Devotion and Disrepute: William H. Johnson’s Florence, South Carolina, Paintings, circa 1944” in William H. Johnson: An American Modern (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 22-39, 88-101.
