Nevill Johnson: Paint the smell of grass - Eoin O'Brien

The third almost suggests collage, which Johnson does not seem to have used until the 1970s.
They both suggest illusion and destroy it. Stones and shells seem to sit on a ledge but also are
placed on other planes that shift our perceptions of the space. The sky in another work of the time,
Monkstown Whorl, is pulled apart as if it were a piece of material, for the sun to shine through.
The professional progress which Nevill Johnson had made in the years he had spent so far in
Dublin was remarkable. Much of the work he exhibited well into his time in Dublin was probably
painted in Ulster, or at the time he moved south, but there had by 1950 been a striking shift towards
a more formally complex and intellectually ambitious manner of painting, which then dominated the
increasingly dark paintings of the 1950s. His standing amongst the Dublin art world was rising and
the critic of the Dublin Magazine wrote of his 1952 exhibition that it “shows such phenomenal
development since his one-man show of last year that…I feel that Johnson can be numbered
amongst that first half-dozen important modern painters in the country at the moment.
“I am not suggesting that his line of development has changed: he is still concerned with the
creation of a personal symbolism. But whereas formerly his detachment, expressed through an
extreme austerity in execution, deprived his work of depth, a considerable proportion of his more
recent pictures show him to be a painter not only of imagination, but of feeling. In other words his
intellectualism has become fused with emotion and his imagination tempered with feeling. A picture
like Harlequin or À la Recherche, though basically formal creations, contains at the same time an
element of poetry which raise them far above the limitations of abstraction. They are satisfying, not
merely architecturally, but emotionally. Lot’s Wife, though nearer to abstraction, has an impressive
dignity of form. Some of the less ambitious pictures, the gay and strongly-coloured King, or the
direct and simple Cat, show Johnson’s newly acquired freedom in his approach to paint.”
It is revealing that the most observant and acute writing on Johnson’s work dates from this
period in Dublin. Johnson always recalled his life in Dublin with pleasure, “day to day living
passed unhurried, inexpensive, and a light-footed sanity prevailed.” His success with
Waddington’s and at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art was increased by high profile London
exhibitions such as that arranged by Waddington at Heal’s and particularly at Arthur Tooth and
Sons, a gallery which exhibited contemporary British artists, such as Henry Moore, as well as
nineteenth century European painters. In hindsight it prefigures Waddington’s interest in the
wider market for paintings outside Ireland, but it must have promised much for his Ulster artists
too. Johnson’s work was also included in an exhibition, Contemporary Ulster Paintings held in
Edinburgh in 1951 by the Scottish Committee of the Arts Council. He was represented by the
painting bought by Zoltan Lewinter Frankl and most of the exhibition was indeed drawn from
this remarkable and wide-ranging collection.
In moving to Dublin, Johnson to a degree abandoned the middle classes and the concomitant
security, and found a world of outsiders with whom he felt a sense of liberation. As he wrote,
40 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Still Life with Falling Leaves
“There existed a fair degree of inequality in Dublin in the fifties. The poor remained poor,
observing their stations; secure in the knowledge that poverty lay ahead, well-defined.” He recalls
a small and dingy bar in Dublin where he was first treated with suspicion and gradually accepted
in a strange euphoria of sympathy and solidarity. In having no obligations, perhaps, Johnson could
choose friends according to his own conscience, and it seems likely that alongside his anger is a
sense of guilt at having been part of the class of officers, politicians and businessmen who held
themselves apart from the underclasses they had helped to create.
In this we can perhaps see the starting point for one of the most remarkable of the many
diverse projects Johnson pursued throughout his life. It was probably in 1952 that he began to
photograph on a systematic basis the Dublin he later described as The People’s City. It was a city
of slums decayed from Georgian grandeur, of a freewheeling spirit that just survived the poverty,
disease and lack of opportunities that was all it offered the inhabitants of the areas that Johnson
visited. It was a city of markets, carts and pubs that seemed to have avoided the mechanisation
that had irrevocably altered other European cities, that almost recalled the Paris Ernest
Hemingway had written of almost half a century earlier. It was also a city dominated by the
Nevill Johnson l The Dublin years 1947–1958 41