Artists

William Johnstone

Scottish 1897 - 1981

If you have had the pleasure of visiting the long-anticipated, newly re-opened Scottish Art wing at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh (re-opened 2023), the first painting you are likely to have set eyes on is the monumental masterpiece ‘A Point in Time’ (1921/37) by William Johnstone.

The huge canvas is a formidable sight; with abstract twists of black, blues and greens creating fathomless caverns. It is hung against a bold, blood-red wall immediately facing the entrance. In this phenomenal artwork the curators of the National Galleries found the key visual within the collection to challenge tired perceptions. The re-hang’s opening statement could not be clearer: 20th century Scottish art was seriously accomplished, outward-looking and Modern with a capital ‘M’. This curatorial choice also elevates Johnstone himself emphatically and with purpose; literally centralising his significance within the story of Scottish art – not to say international modernism - as never before.

Born in the Borders in 1897 to a farming background and expected to follow his father's profession, Johnstone, a powerful personality, mixed with other radical thinkers in the Edinburgh College of Art in the 1920s. Alongside the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Johnstone was pivotal within the conception of the “Scottish Renaissance”. This was a cultural movement spanning art and literature that looked to move away from the perceived stagnancy of the centralised British cultural self-view, advocating instead a modernisation - and independence - of Scottish political and cultural values.

His workshop dates to 1920, the year after Johnstone enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art with the assistance of an ex-service grant. After spending his teens working on the family farm, he was conscripted to the army in 1918, and spent much of his service as an agricultural labourer. Duncan Macmillan has suggested that ‘if to become a painter he left the land, being a painter brought him back to it’. However, Johnstone’s autobiography makes clear that he never truly overcame the guilt he felt for betraying his father.

Johnstone recalls that he never felt particularly inspired by his teachers at Edinburgh College of Art, whom he believed lacked passion. The only staff member under whom he enjoyed studying was Henry Lintott, a painting tutor and founding member of the Edinburgh School. Lintott was a significant portrait artist who usually portrayed sitters within atmospheric, dimly-lit surroundings with soft light illuminating their form, and minimal detailing to the background in order to concentrate attention on his subject.

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Stylistically, William Johnstone was an early adopter of modernist ideas, which are not apparent to the same degree in Lintott’s painting. This might be indebted to a broader ideological shift at the College led, naturally, by certain teachers: John Duncan, in particular, was an enthusiastic proponent of modern art, and while he is not mentioned in Johnstone’s autobiography, perhaps his influence at the College encouraged the young Johnstone’s experiments with modernist principles.

In 1925 he was awarded a Carnegie Travelling Scholarship which enabled him to study in Paris with André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, as well as the Atelier Colarossi. In his studio, Lhote taught a different kind of Cubism- one which integrated an understanding and analysis of the Old Masters in relation to the modern style of Cubism. It was these teachings, combined with an awareness and exposure to the Surrealism prevalent in Paris during the late 1920s, that created the groundwork for Johnstone’s great abstract works later in life.

In 1926 he travelled further afield to Spain, Italy and North Africa, accompanied by Max Bernd-Cohen, an American lawyer-turned-artist who become a lifelong friend. His circle of acquaintances in Paris at that time included the artists Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, and the eminent collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1927, Johnstone married the American sculptor Flora MacDonald, spending subsequent years in America and Scotland. They settled in London in the 1930s, with intermittent teaching commitments enabling him to return to America sporadically for the next twenty years.

Indeed, it was teaching that became his major life’s work and he was no less innovative within this field than within his art practice. He held the position of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1945 and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In this capacity he is credited with evolving the ideologies of each school, bringing them more in line with Continental art and design principles akin to the Bauhaus and creating teaching opportunities for exciting young avant-garde artists including Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Alan Davie and Eduardo Paolozzi. His services to education within the arts earned him an O.B.E. for his contributions to art education in 1945.

Johnstone suffered a nervous breakdown in the early 1940s, due to the stress and events surrounding the divorce from his first wife, the American artist Flora MacDonald. He was prone to episodes of depression, which produced dramatic shifts in the development of his work. But in general, from the late 1940s, Johnstone’s paintings became more colourful than the sombre works of the previous decade, the darker of which reflected the circumstances of the war and the unhappy twists of his own life.

Sojourns teaching in America included positions as Fulbright Lecturer and Director of the Colorado Springs Fine Art Centre Summer School. He also lectured at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Taliesin, Wisconsin, in 1949 and 1950. He enjoyed the concept of the Wild West and found inspiration in the geography of Colorado. During this time abroad, his works became further sunnier, more golden, and his brushstroke freer. Johnstone eventually returned to the Borders and, in 1955, moved to Satchell’s Farm, Lilliesleaf, where he slowly turned to farming, working sporadically during holidays until his retirement from the Central School in 1960. It was after his retirement that he finally moved back to the Borders fulltime to concentrate on painting and farming. His work during this period became dominated by colour and expressionistic shapes, instead of line and form.

Johnstone’s friend and colleague, the artist and theorist Anton Ehrenzweig, summarised three stylistic phases in Johnstone’s painting career. Firstly, a surrealist phase of the 1930s, a cubist phase of the 1940s and finally his calligraphic or tachist phase of the 1950s.

Dark Borders Landscape, dated 1925, can be read as a psychological take on the Scottish landscape; a brooding, abstract suggestion of elemental forces, mood and place. His Borders landscapes are often executed in the darkest of tones. Art historian Beth Williamson has suggested a psychological interpretation of the tumultuous dreichness inherent within these early Scottish landscapes; perceiving a troubled relationship with the soil he and his kin sprang from and laboured over so tirelessly, but which offered only the scantest living in return. She also notes the sense of alienation Johnstone felt upon his return to his home farm after having been conscripted in World War I. Despite fortunately never seeing active duty, the distress caused by the exposure to traumatised front-line soldiers, paired with the sense of his own fate hanging perilously in the balance while waiting for the call up, forever changed the young artist.

“The earth has been a very great creative mother for the artist, the poet, the composer; but the material of the soil can produce its own art. With these thoughts I made my plaster reliefs in order to find confirmation of my conviction that the medium of plaster would itself reveal its own miracle. I knew that in myself I must produce a condition, relaxed and free from thought or deliberation; that which would be produced through my hands would then be from my inner self and be completely unconscious. I throw the lump of crude, wet plaster on the smooth polished surface; a gesture of creation... and the plaster sets.”

– William Johnstone, in the catalogue introduction for ‘Genesis’, ten plaster reliefs exhibited by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1973

Even as early as the 1920s, Johnstone had developed an innovative and unique paint application that embraced expressive, totally intuitive brushwork. This expressionistic take on abstraction - “dripping” his paint as early as the 1920s - latterly saw his work referred to in the context of American Abstract Expressionism (the so-called “action painters”). Johnstone’s work in fact pre-figures this school of artists and his approach has, as Ehrenzweig indicated, much more in common with the ‘automatic drawing’ techniques of the Parisian Surrealist school in Paris: psychological forces made tangible in paint.

The goal of Johnstone’s art practice was to assimilate his interests and fields of influence to totally unique effect, evolving an entirely personal style. His reference points were diverse but always drawn to that which is distilled and instinctual over pre-meditated: from the Pictish carving of his Scottish homeland to the New Mexico school, and from Asian calligraphy to Primitivism and the artwork of children. At the heart of his paintings, whatever the period, you will always find expressive, intuitive mark-making.

This creative belief-system was extrapolated to its extreme in the plaster relief series he created in 1970, as an elderly man. In these works, from one of the most celebrated decades of his artistic career, the physical and metaphysical combine to create extraordinary sculptural objects that read as simultaneously ancient and futuristic.

Just before his death in 1981, The Hayward Gallery, London, held a major retrospective of his career, which included over 200 large and small scale works.