On the occassion of the museum retrospective, La revelation de Meyreuil, Mitchell Johnson appeared on live TV in Nice, France May 16, 2024.
Monday, May 20, 2024
Monaco Matin writes about the Mitchell Johnson Museum Retrospective at Villa Les Camilias in Cap d'Ail, France
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| Monaco Matin, May 14, 2024 |
La Villa Les Camélias va se parer le temps d'une exposition, des œuvres du peintre américain Mitchell Johnson du 17 mai au 29 septembre. Le musée intègre cette exposition dans le cadre des célébrations de son dixième anniversaire.
Une évolution à travers le monde
Reconnu à l'international, l'artiste de 60 ans a voyagé dans plusieurs pays pour s'inspirer en plus d'approfondir et complexifier son travail. Ses œuvres font partie de 30 collections permanentes de musées à travers la planète.
Originaire de New York, le peintre s'est tourné vers la Californie pour perfectionner ses techniques auprès d'un des pionniers de l'art non-figuratif, Sam Francis, et au sein de la Parsons School of Design.
C'est à l'occasion de ses voyages en Europe que Mitchell Johnson a le plus étoffé son style. Les paysages qu'il a découverts, de la Suède à l'Italie, en passant par la France notamment, l'ont inspiré pour forger sa personnalité artistique.
Meyreuil, un déclic artistique
Mais c'est une petite commune proche d'Aix-en-Provence, Meyreuil, qui retient l'attention du peintre en 1989, faisant évoluer son œuvre au fil de ses passages répétés. L'exposition emprunte d'ailleurs le nom de la ville : La révélation de Meyreuil.
Elle réunira 40 œuvres de Mitchell Johnson retraçant 35 ans de carrière. Celle d'un « post-moderniste », selon le critique d'art américain Donald Kuspit dans un article du magazine spécialisé Hyperallergic en janvier dernier.
Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art in Santa Barbara acquires a Mitchell Johnson painting
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| "Not Santa Barbara," 2017 18x14 inches, oil/canvas |
Mitchell Johnson's paintings are in the permanent collections of over 30 museums including the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum in Santa Barbara, California. This painting, "Not Santa Barbara", will be included in the New Acquisitions exhibit, June-July, 2024.
Watch the Mitchell Johnson BFM Cote D'Azur television interview or read about the museum retrospective at Villa Les Camilias in Hyperallergic.
Monday, May 6, 2024
Mitchell Johnson Paintings in Two Italian Museums
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| "Montisi," 2001 40x70 inches oil/canvas (©2024 Mitchell Johnson) |
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| "Diamonds for Eggleston (Mieders)," 2009 14x20 inches oil/canvas (©2024 Mitchell Johnson) |
The top painting, Montisi, is in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale D'Arte Moderna, in Rome. The lower painting, Diamonds for Eggleston, is in the permanent collection of the Museo Morandi, in Bologna.
Both paintings were exhibited at Villa Taverna, the US Ambassador residence in Rome, and then donated to the museums by Ambassador John Phillips and Linda Douglass.
Mitchell Johnson Museum Retrospective at Villa Les Camilias in Cap d'Ail, France May 17-SEptember 29, 2024
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| "Meyreuil Floor Still Life," 1991 16x24 inches oil/canvas (©2024 Mitchell Johnson) |
Musée de la Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France, presents La révélation de Meyreuil, an exhibition of 50 small paintings by Bay Area artist Mitchell Johnson, on view from May 17 through September 29, 2024. Spanning four decades, the show explores the relationship between Johnson’s early work from Europe with recent paintings from California, New England, and New York.
In 1989, at the age of 25, Mitchell Johnson left New York for his first trip to Europe — a voyage that would launch a lifetime of interaction with color. Landing in Gotland, Sweden, and making his way south to Meyreuil, France, he was drawn to and overwhelmed by the new landscapes and unfamiliar colors and patterns. Driven by a powerful instinct to translate what he saw into paintings, he returned again and again to work on location and to study in museums.
Donald Kuspit on Johnson’s early Meyreuil work:
But where Cezanne fetishized Mont St. Victoire, implicitly a symbol of his delusion of grandeur— climbing and conquering it with his art, he became a Moses giving new commandments about making art — Johnson is down to earth, indeed, in the streets of Meyreuil and the countryside around it. He allows the objects he finds there their everyday autonomy even as he finds aesthetic value in them, rather than reduces them to anonymous abstract form as Cezanne tends to do. ‘Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,’ he wrote to Emile Bernard, that is, emphasize and extract its geometry — make it self-evident. Is the difficulty, effort of doing that — of abstracting the geometrical essence of a concrete thing — the reason for what Picasso called ‘Cezanne’s anxiety?’ In sharp contrast, Johnson’s paintings convey what I would call the serenity of self-possession — the calm of mature self-certainty. Where Cezanne was a proto-modernist, making representational works that were implicitly abstract, Johnson is a post-modernist, making abstract works that are implicitly — often explicitly — representational. He is a master of both modes, seamlessly integrating them to memorable effect, for memory at its most insistent is an abstract representation — an aesthetic epiphany.
La révélation de Meyreuil is on view May 17–September 29, 2024, at Musée de la Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
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