Art for Greenville
Growing up in Florence, William H. Johnson (1901 – 1970) dropped out of school to work for the railroad, helping to support his family and saving to make his way to New York. Once there, he worked a series of odd jobs to pay for his classes at the National Academy of Design. One of his instructors, Impressionist painter Charles Hawthorne, helped fund Johnson’s first trip to Paris.
From there he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa, experimenting with modernist styles and palettes. Successful critically and commercially, Johnson and his Danish wife returned to the U.S. just ahead of World War II. The GCMA is home to the largest collection of paintings by William H. Johnson outside the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
Born in North Carolina to sharecroppers, Thomas Sills (1914 – 2000) steered an unconventional course to achieve success as an artist in New York. When he was only 11, he traveled by train from Raleigh to Harlem, where he stayed with an older brother. He worked odd jobs, including liquor deliveryman, and it was in a Greenwich Village liquor store that Sills met mosaic artist, Jeanne Reynal, who introduced Sills to her circle of friends and colleagues, including the artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, David Hare, Mark Rothko, and critic Harold Rosenberg. Reynal, who later married Sills, acquired works by Max Ernst, the de Koonings, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. As Sills remarked, “With paintings and artists all around me, it didn’t take very long before I got stirred up to doing my own work. I wanted to go my own way from the very beginning.”
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