Artist Stephen T. Johnson extends family’s legacy in new, three-generation show
LAWRENCE — Stephen T. Johnson never knew his grandfather, who died before the lecturer in the University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design was born. Yet you can see the influence of J. Theodore Johnson on his descendant on the walls of the Cider Gallery in a show opening tonight.
“J. Theodore, Ted, and Stephen T. Johnson: A Three Generation Retrospective” continues through March 23.
“My grandfather signed his work J. Theodore, though he was mostly known as Ted,” Stephen Johnson said.
J. Theodore Johnson (1902-1963) studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and hung out in Paris during the 1920s, “hobnobbing with famous artists like Aristide Maillol and playing bridge with Ezra Pound,” his grandson said.
He was professor of art at San José State College from 1945 to 1963. His work — he made drawings, watercolors and oil paintings — is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
Stephen Johnson said his father, also known as Ted, “had a great deal of natural artistic talent, but he saw over time how hard it was being an artist, watching his father’s endless quest for commissions outside of the assurances and routine of academia.”
“My grandfather was a teacher, but also a freelance artist, as I am. And, as I have learned to appreciate like my grandfather, there are no guarantees in the art world. It is a constant quest to find and win new commissions and pursue relevancy in the ever-changing art markets.”
Stephen said his father, Ted, “discovered language in his late teens, influenced by his father’s discussion about artists, ideas and travel abroad. In time, he received a Fulbright scholarship to France and became a medievalist. But then he fell in love with 19th century French poetry and the novels of Marcel Proust.”
Ted Johnson taught French at KU from 1968 to 2001, but he kept drawing practice all the while, and his figure studies — in conté crayon, pastel and watercolor — are featured in the current show. His works now reside in many private collections and at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Missouri. He died in September 2024.
And while there are a few abstract works by all three men, Stephen Johnson said he included mostly his realistic work in the current show, since it fits in best with that of his forebears.
The KU faculty member said he grew up with one of the charcoal life drawings made by his grandfather hung on his bedroom wall. It’s in the show.
“These works had a profound impact on my development as a young creative,” Stephen Johnson said. “I marveled at the way he would render a beautiful face and then allow the collar and the shirt and coat to be indicated with simple marks, unfinished, allowing the viewer to fill in the missing elements in their minds.
“I use that same motif over there,” he said, pointing across the gallery. “There's a portrait of George Shultz from the time of the U.S. invasion of Kuwait.”
Johnson was living in Brooklyn Heights, New York, at the time.
“I did ink and watercolor paintings of famous people, and then I would just call up Time Magazine and keep bringing them over to show the art directors ... and soon I got a couple of cover commissions,” he said.
His greatest hits since then have included the groundbreaking 1995 book “Alphabet City,” which won a Caldecott Honor and was cited as a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year. His large-scale, collagelike public art can be found in subway stations in New York and Los Angeles, at Dallas Love Field Airport, Lenexa City Center Library and Texas Tech University. His work is in numerous private and public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Spencer Museum of Art and that of musician Paul Simon.
Stephen Johnson is proud to be the keeper of his family’s legacy, including his middle name — Theodore.
The new show, he said, is evidence of “a rigorous tradition of art history, an excellence in drawing and observation and how we — or now I — continue to view and experience the world around us. Whether it's through the human figure or a landscape, the endless questions arise: How do you translate what you see into something on a 2D or 3D surface? And inevitably, it is about what the viewer will see, and how we as artists might transform their view of the world in some small way, into something of delight and joy.”