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

46 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
Coal and potato store, Marrowbone Lane
published in book form in 1980, Dublin: The People’s City, which was awarded a prize at the
Leipzig Book Fair. One set of negatives was purchased by RTE, whose plans to create a reel of
them to use as a film with music came to nothing. The other is now in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, although its path there seems a little unclear. The best
tribute to Nevill Johnson as a photographer occurred in 2003, when a selection of the images was
reprinted and exhibited in Dublin at the Lemonstreet Gallery.
This was perhaps the high point of Nevill Johnson’s love of Dublin. He had achieved a
measure of security through his art and his teaching. This latter activity was a mixed blessing;
while there were a number of amateur lady ‘Hollyhockers’, he also had a number of serious pupils
such as Anne Yeats and Cecil King, a businessman who subsequently became a successful abstract
painter. He had also become involved in the theatre, designing and painting stage sets, of which
some photographs survive.
Perhaps one of the most interesting events for Johnson at this period was an exhibition by the
Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, held in 1951, in which Johnson exhibited alongside
Thurloe Conolly and Louis le Brocquy. Although he was never personally close to either of these,
they were perhaps closer to him as artists than the Ulster group he had initially been shown
alongside in the technical and intellectual ambition of their art and also in terms of their
relationship to international painting in the 1940s and 1950s.
The ambition of his work takes Johnson beyond any of his contemporaries in Dublin; the closest
comparison is with Louis le Brocquy at this period. Johnson’s subject matter had altered from the
unpopulated wastelands of the immediate post-war years. Whereas before there had always been the
suggestion of human absence through objects that took on human significance, figures now begin
to dominate. One can speculate whether the number of photographic images of people in their
environment that Johnson took at this time engendered a sympathy with the individual that had
previously been encapsulated by a wider and more anonymous common humanity. Perhaps also he
saw the broader expressive possibilities which the human form opened up.
These paintings have a common atmosphere that runs through them. Even the more diverse
examples, of nurses and nuns, while they have a strangeness that is almost difficult to take seriously,
have an unsettling air. In The Stranger, exhibited in Johnson’s 1952 one-man exhibition, a mother
and child sit in a bare room, the child touching her mother’s leg but turning to look out at the
landscape beyond, where a stranger is approaching from a distance. The fragmentation of every
form into various geometric arrangements, the muted palette and the simplicity of content follows
on from a painting such as Landscape with Rock Pool. Passages of the surface are smoothly and
evenly finished (the folds of material of the mother’s skirt are even reminiscent of the cliffs in
Linenscape almost a decade earlier), but we can see a slightly rougher and more opaque surface in
parts which prefigures the increasingly worked surfaces of the next few years.
Nevill Johnson l The Dublin years 1947–1958 47