ABSTRACT
As an American artist of mixed-race ancestry who matured in the climate of European modernism, painter William H. Johnson stands apart from the conventional primitivists of the early twentieth century. Johnson was part of a generation of visual artists captivated by tribal art, imitated and admired as the creation of exotic primitive peoples whose racial origins positioned them in a world of casual naturalism and mystical spirituality that had been lost to the industrialized West. But as Richard Powell argues, Johnson’s connection to primitivism can be explained neither as a manifestation of racial essentialism nor in terms of the widespread modernist practice of stylistic appropriation from tribal art forms. Rather, it was a complex and deeply felt conviction based on his prolonged self-examination as a person of color who identified with traditional folk cultures and the experience of cultural difference.
Jesus and the Three Marys is understood here as a highly individual work of modern religious art whose formal qualities and emotional tenor are located in the uniqueness of African-American religious experience, specifically the expressive, physical mode of worship practiced by black fundamentalist Christians. Powell attributes to Johnson, as an artist whose works incorporate multiple stylistic and cultural sources, from European modernism to the Harlem Renaissance, an authentic “internalized primitivism” liberated from the degrading connotations with which the term has been encoded.
