Mitchell Johnson Paris Painting, Fifteen Windows, in the March 30, 2025 New York Times Magazine

Advertisement for the exhibition of Giant Paintings in San Francisco

 in the March 30, 2025 New York Times Magazine, page 15, across from The Ethicist.
 

Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting seven large-scale paintings in the lobby of the San Francisco skyscraper 425 Market Street from March 17 to May 30. Works include “Trinity East (Iceberg)” (2020–2024), 78×120 inches, made after a 2018 trip to Newfoundland, as well as three paintings of Johnson’s ongoing muse, the Presidio Park, with its peculiar, still-life-like collection of buildings. Seven sets of note cards accompany the exhibition and are for sale at Amazon and SFMOMA as well as other museums and bookstores.

The exhibition has been reviewed by Donald Kuspit in Whitehot Magazine in March, 2025.

Here is an excerpt of the Kuspit essay:

“Morandi and Albers are Johnson’s role models or mentors.  To my mind’s eye they are phenomenologists par excellence, which is what Johnson is at his best—as in these paintings–aspires to be, however unwittingly.  According to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, “Phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there.’  It is painstaking…in its attentiveness and wonder, its demand for awareness.”  As the philosopher John Cogan writes, in The Phenomenological Reduction, “There is an experience in which it is possible for us to come to the world with no knowledge or preconceptions in hand; it is the experience of astonishment…in the experience of astonishment, our everyday ‘knowing,’ when compared to the knowing that we experience in astonishment, is shown up as a pale epistemological imposter.”  At their best, when they [Johnson’s paintings] have a kind of parsimonious aesthetic intensity and nuanced exactitude, and no longer register as the “belief-performance of our customary life in the world,” they are astonishing masterpieces of phenomenological perception, fraught with what the philosopher George Santayana calls “hushed reverberations.”

Johnson's paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums as well as 700 private collections. His work has appeared in many feature films, most notably, Nancy Meyers films, The Holiday and It's Complicated. Seven paintings were also included in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Johnson's work is widely known because it has appeared in the New York Times Magazine over 200 times going back to 2012. Johnson has appeared on BFM Nice television in France and RAI 3 national television in Italy.

Mitchell Johnson Paintings in the 2025 WSJ Magazine

 

Mitchell Johnson "Giant Race Point Chair" painting in the March 2025 WSJ Magazine

Mitchell Johnson "Presidio #30" painting in the February 2025 WSJ Magazine

Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting seven large-scale paintings in the lobby of the San Francisco skyscraper 425 Market Street from March 17 to May 30. Works include “Trinity East (Iceberg)” (2020–2024), 78×120 inches, made after a 2018 trip to Newfoundland, as well as three paintings of Johnson’s ongoing muse, the Presidio Park, with its peculiar, still-life-like collection of buildings.

Read more about the exhibition in these articles in Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine and InMenlo.

Seven note card sets accompany the San Francisco exhibition and are available at Amazon, SFMOMA, Keplers Books, Explore Booksellers in Aspen and PAAM in Proincetown.

Mitchell Johnson Paintings in The New York Times Magazine January 5 and 19, 2025

 

Mitchell Johnson Positano Painting appears across from The Ethicist, Jan 19, 2025.

Mitchell Johnson Newfoundland Painting appears across from The Ethicist, Jan 5, 2025.

Click the image to enlarge.

New limited edition sets of boxed Mitchell Johnson notecards are available from Amazon.

Click to see the Amalfi set, the Newfoundland set.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Acquire Mitchell Johnson's Potrero Hill, 2004

Portero Hill, 2004,  9x12 inches, gouache on paper.

Click the image to see a larger version.

The Achenbach Foundation, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, acquired this painting in 2005.

©2004 Mitchell Johnson, gouache on paper, 9x12 inches, Collection of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation. Gift of Bruce and Julie Tenenbaum.

The painting is reproduced in the Mitchell Johnson monograph from 2004 that accompanied exhibits of Johnson's work at Terrence Rogers Fine Art in Santa Monica.

Mitchell Johnson San Francisco Boxed Notecards Set now available at Amazon and Bay Area Museum and Bookstores

 

San Francisco Boxed Notecards is set #7 of seven new Mitchell Johnson notecard sets being released in January, 2025. Each of these seven limited-edition boxed sets of notecards are beautifully designed and feature 20 blank cards of 5 different paintings (4 cards of each) and 20 blank envelopes. The seven themes in this series capture the gamut of places that inspire Johnson's work: Amalfi Coast, North Truro (Cape Cod), Paris, Maine, Race Point (Provincetown), Newfoundland and of course, San Francisco. The photos below, included with each Amazon listing, provide a clear description of the contents of the set you are considering. A biographical flysheet accompanies each set and the colorful notecards are printed on high quality stock and are perfect for writing correspondence and thank you notes. The San Francisco set includes compositions based on views from 1750 Taylor Street (Russian Hill), 555 California Street, Chinatown and the Presidio. Mitchell Johnson moved to Palo Alto, California from New York City in 1990 to work for the artist, Sam Francis. He settled in California after meeting his wife, author/chef Donia Bijan.

Mitchell Johnson studied painting, drawing and art history at Staten Island Academy, Randolph-Macon College, The Washington Studio School, The New York Studio School, The Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts and in 1990 received an MFA in Painting from Parsons School of Design in New York City. Johnson's paintings are in the permanent collections of over 35 museums including Galleria Nazionale D'Arte Moderna in Rome, Museo Morandi in Bologna, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Achenbach Foundation in San Francisco and Bornholms Kunstmuseum in Denmark. A full list of museum collections is under the biography tab on his website. Johnson's paintings have appeared in numerous feature films including The Holiday (2006), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) and It's Complicated (2009). Johnson has been a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Borgo Finocchieto in Tuscany and The LeWitt House in Praiano, Italy.

Mitchell Johnson North Truro Boxed Notecards Now available at Amazon

 

North Truro Notecards is set #1 of seven new Mitchell Johnson notecard sets being released in January, 2025. Each of these seven limited-edition boxed sets of notecards are beautifully designed and feature 20 blank cards of 5 different paintings (4 cards of each) and 20 blank envelopes. The seven themes in this series capture the gamut of places that inspire Johnson's work: Amalfi Coast, North Truro (Cape Cod), Paris, Maine, Race Point (Provincetown), Newfoundland and of course, San Francisco. The photos below, included with each Amazon listing, provide a clear description of the contents of the set you are considering. A biographical flysheet accompanies each set and the colorful notecards are printed on high quality stock and are perfect for writing correspondence and thank you notes. Mitchell Johnson has been making annual painting trips to Cape Cod since 2005. He teaches a master color class at Truro Center for the Arts each September.

Mitchell Johnson's color- and shape-driven paintings exist at the intersection of color theory, art history, nostalgia, and observed experience. His work is included in the permanent collections of over 35 museums and has been exhibited alongside works by Milton Avery, Georgia O'Keeffe, Wolf Kahn, and Richard Diebenkorn. The legendary art critic Donald Kuspit wrote about Johnson's work in Whitehot Magazine: "Johnson is a master of abstraction, as his oddly constructivist paintings show, but of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to contain and with that control the strong feelings implicit in his strong colors. Apart from that, his paintings are art historically important, because they seamlessly fuse abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky tore apart to the detriment of both even as he recognized that they were implicitly inseparable, tied together in a Gordian knot, as they masterfully are in Johnson's paintings."

Legacy in Continuum: Bay Area Figuration at Bakersfield Museum of Art March 22, 2012 - May 27, 2012

 

Mitchell Johnson "Torrenieri," 2011 22x26 inches, oil/canvas

     World War II shocked our global sense of reality. After 1945, artists of significance could no longer create recognizable images that had sustained the creative world for centuries. Figuration, which represented the world of the past, was obliterated; blocking, what seemed to be, all artistic roads. How were passionate artists to create? 

     Rather than working, as they had, with color, shape, line, and space to create traditional, recognizable subjects, in a known and conventional process, artists began to "deconstruct" art. They ripped aesthetic concepts apart, flattened the picture plane searching for a new painterly essence in unexplored territories. As their view of process became transformed, unexpected possibilities were revealed. They achieved immediacy with the newly invented acrylic paint, layering it in painting, drawing, collage and assemblage, and increasingly. in non-obiective images. They discovered unconventional methods and tools to build their art. In these radical processes, where aesthetic content was profoundly altered, artists discovered that color, shape, line, space, materials, and process could become their subject. They realized that when individual artistic components relate to each other in unaccustomed ways, they yield fresh abstract possibilities. Consequently, Abstract  Expressionism, as the orginal movement had been labeled, became the most expressive mode of the day. It was a complete reformation of the known artistic process and purpose. 

     In the San Francisco area, The Bay Area Figurative Artists expanded and integrated the thinking of the Abstract Expressions by seeing a profound connection between abstraction and figuration. Artists realized that their heritage need not be discarded: that it was possible to work in both modes simultaneously. Moreover, melding two forms of expression could be a metamorphosis yielding a perceptibly new aesthetic form. Certainly, this was no easy task. It requires that each artist develop an individual process while working in at least two modes of expression. Inevitably, when creating in two modes, the shadow of a third could possibly appear, giving increased richness to what might transpire, endowing art with greater sources of visual possibilities. 

     Courageously, the original Bay Area Figurative artists worked non-figuratively, often in an indeterminate space that emerged from vibrant strokes of their brush. Within this atmosphere, they brought back the figure, a subject, at that time, which was considered passé. David Park, an original Bay Area Figurative master, speaking for himself, but representing the vision of his colleagues "saw no distinction between nonobjective and figurative painting." Because it was a mode of expression that was an amalgam of non-traditional approaches, the first generation of Bay Area Figurative painters set a standard that could freely bring past and present together on the same canvas. 

     Today, more than 60 years later, there are approximately three generations of Bay Area Figurative artists and growing. They no longer come only from the Bay Area, but  from many places in the USA and the world. These contemporary artists have carved out paths that evolved in different and individual ways, based on the uniqueness of each artist, his or her life's influences, and the social milieu. With each generation, tied in part to the original artistic philosophy, the movement changes and the art broadens, becoming more global in scope and direction. Evident in this exhibition is a continuum. Contemporary artists reference and personalize powerful aspect of the original philosophy. They prove, in this art exhibition, that contemporary Bay Area Figurative art, founded originally by the most insightful of artists, continues to be even more expansive and vibrant with the increase of artists drawn to it and with each new work of art they create. Roberta Carasso, Ph.D. Elected member of the International Art Critics Association. Student of original Abstract Expressionist artists - Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Hans Hofmann. Selected as a private painting student of Willem de Kooning. 

-Roberta Carasso, Ph.D. 

Legacy in Continuum: Bay Area Figuration at the Bakersfield Museum of Art March 22, 2012-May 27, 2012 was curated by Vikki L. Cruz featured paintings by Nathan Oliveira, Dennis Hare, Paul Wonner, Suhas Bhujbal, Elmer Bischoff, Kim Frohsin, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Mitchell Johnson, John Goodman, Siddharth Parasnis, and Theophilus Brown.