Mitchell Johnson: Color as Content

by Alexander Nemerov, Jennifer Samet, Sofie Filt Læntver

There are limited copies of this rare publication. This massive 288 page monograph includes over 250 color plates and is published to accompany an exhibit of Mitchell Johnson's paintings at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in 2015 as well as several San Francisco exhibitions. Essays written by Alexander Nemerov, Jennifer Samet, John Seed, John Goodrich, Claude Pichevin, Marilena Pasquali, Sofie Filt Læntver and Peter Campion establish a context for Johnson's color and shape driven work. The book also includes a 2009 interview by Art Historian Peter Selz from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Numerous color reproductions of paintings by Bonnard, Vuillard, Morandi and Josef Albers explore Corot's relationship to Modernism and contemporary painting and suggest a separate branch to 20th century art history as first identified by Fairfield Porter.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 3, 2014

About the author

A scholar of American art, Nemerov writes about the presence of art, the recollection of the past, and the importance of the humanities in our lives today. Committed to teaching the history of art more broadly as well as topics in American visual culture — the history of American photography, for example — he is a noted writer and speaker on the arts. His most recent books are Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (2013) and Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (2010). In 2011 he published To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011), the catalogue to the exhibition of the same title he curated at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among his recent essays are pieces on Peter Paul Rubens, on Henry James, on Thomas Eakins and JFK; and on Rothko and Rembrandt.