By Bruce Weber
In anticipation of the upcoming summer exhibition Making Her Mark: 50 Women Artists of the Historic Woodstock Art Colony at the Historical Society of Woodstock, the website Learning Woodstock Art Colony will give primary focus this year to the lives and accomplishments of women painters and sculptors of the Catskills town. It will also feature an essay on the life of the colorful and often outrageous Louise Hellstrom, who was a fashion designer, art collector and philanthropist, but also dabbled in painting, and was married for a period to the Swedish journalist and writer Gustaf Hellstrom, who served as a managing editor of Hervey White’s Maverick Press magazine The Plowshare.
Unknown Photographer
Grace Mott Johnson, n.d.
Archives of American Art
Grace Mott Johnson is best remembered today for her sculpture of animals and association with the artist Andrew Dasburg. Johnson was born in New York City, and had a hard and restless childhood. Following her mother Laura’s death when she was an infant, her father Alfred resigned his post as a Presbyterian minister and became an itinerant preacher in New England. As a child she became enthralled by animals, and modelled and carved animal figures in soap and with a jack knife. In addition to travelling with her father and siblings, during the course of her youth she also lived for periods with her family in Yonkers and Monsey, New York. She was home schooled by her strictly religious father according to his personal notions of John Dewey's concept of "learning by doing." She later expressed her good fortune in managing to emerge from her early years as a “believer in nature and science as opposed to [his] oppressive Puritanism.”(1)
Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899)
The Horse Fair, 1852-1855
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown Photographer
Gutzon Borglum in His Studio, c. 1910
At the age of 21, Johnson received a modest inheritance from her grandmother. By this time she had decided to become a painter after viewing Rosa Bonheur’s large monumental painting The Horse Fair at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She rode away on a bicycle from the family farm, and with all her worldly possessions strapped aboard, traveled to Yonkers, where she moved in with her aunt, and later settled in New York City. Johnson enrolled at the Art Students League where she studied painting and sculpture. She related later that she “did not do this to be an artist but to learn what was taught, something about methods of work and to gain technical experience.”(2) She found the instruction at the league to be deadening, with the exception of sculptor Gutzon Borglum.
Unknown Photographer,
Birge Harrison Summer Class,
Woodstock, 1907
Woodstock Artists Association
and Archives
Andrew Dasburg fourth from left
& Grace Johnson third from right.
Unknown Photographer
Andrew Dasburg, c. 1913
Archives of American Art
During the summers of 1907 and 1908, Johnson studied with Birge Harrison at the Woodstock School of Landscape Painting. She became romantically involved with her classmate Andrew Dasburg, and they married in 1909. They chose not to exchange traditional vows as Johnson desired that that theirs be a completely free alliance, and the two would go on to lead very independent lives. During lengthy walks at the beginnjng of their relationship she encouraged Dasburg to pursue his art. The couple was visited in Woodstock by the artist Morgan Russell who shared his revelations about the European art he had witnessed during his recent trip to Paris, especially by Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. The following spring the couple joined Russell in Paris. About this time Johnson abandoned the idea of becoming an animal painter and turned her exclusive attention to sculpture.
August Rodin (1840-1917)
The Wounded Lion, 1881
Bronze
August Rodin (1840-1917)
Detail:The Burghers of Calais,
1884-1895
Bronze
Musee Rodin, Paris
In Paris, Johnson came under the spell of the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. Art historian Ilene Fort, who organized the 1995 exhibition The Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity, noted that, commonly, “young [American] sculptors who began their career in the 1910s experienced a Rodin period as if it were an obligatory rite of passage.”(3)
Rodin awakened Johnson to the formal and expressive possibilities of modelling animals in movement, and in rendering the play of light across animated, and richly modeled surfaces. Rodin showed other sculptors how to revel in the changing patterns of reflections on the surface of a work, and how to take advantage of the fluid and expressive qualities of bronze.
Assyrian Hunting Scene and Wild Horses, 645-625 BC
British Museum
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Percheron Horses, c. 1910
Plaster
Archives of American Art
During her time abroad Johnson also became interested in the ancient Assyrian art she saw at the British Museum in London, especially the reliefs showing hunts and wild horses. In France she made a special study of the Percheron draft horse. At the Paris Salon of 1910 she exhibited a relief sculpture of this well-muscled horse, known for its intelligence, and willingness to work. The sculpture is unlocated, but an undated plaster sculpture in the round of Percheron horses is known through a photograph.
Henri Matisse (1869-1944)
Dance (1), 1909
Museum of Modern Art
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Apples, 1877-1878
Morgan Library, Gift of Eugene Thaw
Former House of Grace Mott Johnson
and Andrew Dasburg
Lewis Hollow Road,
Woodstock, New York
Alf Evers Papers,
Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Young Oxen, c. 1910-1911
Plaster
Archives of American Art
During her stay in Paris Johnson suffered a miscarriage, and returned home alone to Woodstock in late 1909 or early 1910. Josephine Bloodgood has related how Henry Lee McFee, and other artist friends in Woodstock, appealed to Johnson to show them any sketches Dasburg included in letters to her after she returned to Woodstock, in order to gage the impact on Dasburg of the modern art he was witnessing in Paris, including the work of Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso.(4)
In Woodstock, Johnson purchased a large hillside property. In 1921, the artists Peggy Bacon and Alexander Brook would rent the property, located on the southeastern slope of Overlook Mountain in the area known as Lewis Hollow. The old farmhouse is located at the present day 192 Lewis Hollow Road. It later became the home of Woodstock historian Alf Evers and his wife Helen. It was there that Johnson began working on a series of bronze bas reliefs of sheep, oxen and zebras. The landscape painter John F. Carlson owned a bronze relief of sheep, and displayed it prominently above one of the fireplace’s in his home in Woodstock. By the mid-1920s Johnson and Dasburg settled in a house on Meads Mountain Road.
Detail from Wetterau Map of Woodstock Artist Houses with Rosie McGee
House and Later Residence
of Andrew Daburg and Grace
Mott Johnson, 1926
Konrad Cramer (1888-1963)
Rosie McGee of Rock City, n.d
Gelatin silver print
Unknown Photographer
Rose McGee’s Boarding House, n.d.
Konrad and Florence Ballin Cramer Papers, Archives of American Art
John Herron Art Institute
In around 1910, the so-called Rock City Group was formed. It initially consisted of Dasburg, McFee, Johnson, Marion Ballard, Charles Baylee Cook, Walter Goltz, Alexis B. Many, Justus Pfeiffen, and Benjamin Bufano, all of whose works were included in the exhibition of the group held at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis from January 20 to February 3, 1912.
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Elephant, c. 1922
Plaster
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Elephant, by 1923
Plaster
After returning to America, Johnson became friendly with an elephant trainer for Barnum and Bailey’s circus and often followed the circus when it was on the road. She was especially fascinated by elephants. She sculpted the popular circus elephants Mighty and Bebbe, whom she watched grow up over the course of the years. Of elephants she remarked “I watch the elephant and study it. I see and sleep and breathe elephants. Then finally I feel elephants and get to work on a piece.”(5)
Grace Mott Johnson
Elephants, c. 1912
Plaster
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Chimpanzees, 1912
Bronze
Woodstock Artists
Association and Museum
With the help and support of sculptor Jo Davidson, with whom the couple had spent time in Paris, Dasburg and Johnson exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913. Johnson and Davidson had become friendly years before at the Art Students League. Johnson showed four works at the Armory Show, including her reliefs of walking elephants and Chimpanzees, now in the collection of the Woodstock Artist Association and Museum. Dated 1912 the piece was cast in bronze by the Griffoul foundry in Newark, New Jersey. It was donated to the Woodstock Artists Association by Johnson’s son Alfred. During her trips with the circus Johnson became interested in sculpting images of chimpanzees.
In her art, Johnson above all sought to make her subjects look alive. She aimed to finish a piece with the same spirit of excitement and interest with which she began. Usually she sculpted subjects from memory rather than using models. She believed there was no end to the ways animals could be incorporated as subjects in her bas reliefs. In 1917 and 1936 she received prizes from the National Association of Women Painters and Scuptors.
Unknown Photographer
Grace Mott Johnson with Pony, Taos,
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Pueblo Indian Woman
and Bake Oven , c 1920
Gelatin silver print
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Camel, c. 1922
Plaster
Archives of American Art
From 1918-1922, Johnson and Dasburg split their time between Woodstock and Taos, New Mexico. Out West Johnson spent time in the high Sierras observing the life of the Pueblo Indians. After her divorce in 1922 from Dasburg, she traveled to Egypt where she modeled sculptures of camels and Arabian horses. She also created reliefs that were drawn with deeply incised lines, and sparely modeled in broad planes. In late July and early Augist 1918, Johnson was part of a group exhibition at the Maverick Concert Hall in West Hurley which included the women artists Florida Duncan, Phebe Ropes, and Hester Murray Miller.
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Mary More, c. 1935
Bronze
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Portrait Study, c. 1935
Plaster
In the mid-1930s Johnson executed a series of portraits in bronze and polychromed plaster of African-American men, women and children. Her bronze bust of the young African American girl Mary More is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Around this time Johnson applied color to the surface of animal figures she rendered in plaster. During the Great Depression she lost her studio in New York City, lived with several friends and family members, and suffered a mental breakdown.
Unknown Phitographer
Grace Johnson, c 1920
Gelatin silver print
By the end of the 1930s, Johnson almost completely abandoned art to devote her attebtion to the cause of civil rights. During the decade she demanded that her black friends be allowed come to Jones Beach in Long Island, which at the time was segregated. In her later years Johnson lived in Pleasantville, New York, where she died in 1963. According to art historian Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein, Johnson’s advocacy of ideas, ranging from civil rights to opening up the local swimming pool to black people and nude sunbathing, proved “a bit too avant-garde for some of the staid villagers.”(6)
(1) Erna Conkling Lee, Biographical Encyclopedia of American Women (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1974) p. 166.
(2) Ibid., p. 168.
3 Ilene Susan Fort, "The Cult of Rodin and the Birth of Modernism in America," essay in The Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1995), p. 31.
4 Josephine Bloodgood, Embracing the New: Modernism's Impact on Woodstock Artists (Woodstock, New York: Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, 2013, p. 24.
(5) "Pleasantville Personalities: II. Grace Mott Johnson," Green Lantern, Pleasantville, February 1, 1937, p. 2.
(6) Charlotte Striefer Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions (Boston: G. K. Gall & Company, 1990), p. 240
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