“His story still astonishes. Nowhere in the annals of African American art is there a life’s work, a life’s journey, like that of William H. Johnson — that folk painter of Harlem, that European modernist, that polished academic — who began his artist’s life as a poor boy in the Jim Crow South drawing in the dust, and ended it in madness, a street person, a ruin. . . . To fully understand the man, his passions, his tragedies, all that he absorbed, and all that he discarded, you have to read the deeply moving book on Johnson’s life and art by Richard J. Powell that accompanies this show. . . .” Paul Richard, exhibition review of Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, The Washington Post, 14 September 1991.
Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
