Malvin Gray Johnson
We celebrate Black History Month in February!
Malvin Gray Johnson, the artist we present today, was active during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s. The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem (in New York City). Would you like to learn more about this movement and its artists?
Johnson simplified the forms of his subjects and occasionally emphasized his African past by including African imagery in his paintings. The compressed space in his Self Portrait speaks to Johnson’s profound awareness of modernist compositional devices. The easel at the left side of the canvas identifies him as an artist, and the masks in the background make an assertive statement about his African heritage. In 1934, the year he painted his self-portrait, Johnson joined the ranks of the Public Works of Art Project, the first of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal art programs, which paid artists a monthly stipend. Although the job lasted only six months, Johnson was finally able to paint full time. Ironically, the year proved to be Johnson’s most prolific but also the last of his short life.
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