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

autobiography; produced a group of photographs, despite having had no training or background
in this discipline, which are judged by leading contemporary photographers such as Perry Ogden
to be amongst the best photographic work done in Ireland; wrote film scripts and film reviews for
various magazines in London; designed stage sets for plays and fabrics for John McGuire, who
owned Brown Thomas; patented his own inventions; wrote polemics against the state. Above all
he worked as a painter, sculptor and printmaker and made collages and drawings over seven
decades.
Ultimately it was as a visual artist that he worked and was best known to the public. It is a
shame that at the time he was most actively exhibiting in London, the late 1960s, the taste of the
art market was for pop art and an abstraction influenced by the American painters of the time,
both far removed from the subtle intensity of Nevill Johnson’s work in that decade.
An extensive obituary published in The Times on 13th October 1999 notes the
intellectualism, social conscience and independence that mark him out from the other painters of
the Waddington group of the post-war years and which remain consistently present in his later
work. It is this independence that makes Johnson’s work difficult to judge, since he does not fit
easily into any group. As an Englishman, he is immediately different. The easily approachable and
occasionally provincial charm of Dillon, Campbell and O’Neill are many miles away from his work
and technically he is arguably their superior. Very few of this group of artists received much formal
training but John Luke’s influence provided sound foundations for Johnson’s subsequent
development.
The seriousness and international outlook of Johnson’s work mark him out from nearly all
Irish painters of his generation. He assimilated the varied influences of European modernism but
his physical distance gave his work a remarkable independence of vision once he acquires the
confidence to start exhibiting. He is always selective in the artists he looks at: Yves Tanguy,
Edward Wadsworth, Tristram Hillier and Giorgio de Chirico he would have seen in Paris and
London in 1936, as well, of course, as Picasso, Braque and Gris. Gris is a striking, yet rarely
mentioned, influence on paintings such as The Fortune Teller and The Clown.
So while Johnson was influenced by surrealism, he was never a surrealist, and while he
exhibited with Waddington, he was never a typical Waddington artist. But his career and his art
cannot be separated from Ireland. His paintings from the early 1940s are arguably the earliest
modernist treatments of the Irish landscape in relation to events in the contemporary world. This
work also demonstrates immense technical and imaginative skills that rival those of any of his
contemporaries. He became the artist who depicted first Belfast and Ulster, then Dublin with the
unerring judgement of an outsider, but with the underlying fondness of one who felt great
affection for these places. In the two eponymous paintings, his Belfast is an abstract pattern of
conformity, his Dublin a jumbled rack of toppling houses, raffish and lively but precarious. He
114 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass
depicted the oppression of the church in Ireland, the romantic beauty of the Ulster landscape with
an eerie silence of a country at war, the poverty of Dublin’s elegant Georgian terraces.
While many Irish artists chose to romanticise the country around them, Johnson became the
most honest painter of its cities in the post-war era. But he saw his calling on a broader level; while
Belfast trained him and Dublin seduced him, his work needed the broad skies and timelessness of
Suffolk to be able to express the level of humanity that he began to feel in such an ancient place.
Johnson’s art always has meaning and the imaginative power to best express that, but in the
mature style that evolves in the 1960s and is present in the 1970s he makes the two most
indivisible. While he lived in England, he rarely exhibited there and is little known there. There
is a sad irony that John Kasmin, one of the great gallerists and dealers who represented Hockney,
Caro and Hodgkin, amongst many others, recently noted and admired a painting by Nevill
Johnson, but when Johnson went to see a Hockney exhibition at Kasmin in 1960, he seems not
to have mentioned his own work to them.
But commercial success and recognition might not have meant a great deal to Johnson, as
indeed he had turned his back on it in the 1950s, distrusting the easy fame of Dublin. Without
much encouragement, he still produced an extensive and impressive body of work throughout
these later decades. The exhibitions at Tom Caldwell’s and the Solomon Gallery complete the
work shown by Victor Waddington in a previous era and in totality represent a body of work
alongside which, I would argue, no other artist working in Ireland at the same period could stand,
in terms of formal quality, ambition and meaning. Purely as a painter, he succeeds and convinces
consistently to a remarkable degree.
Knowledge of his work is so limited that his stature as a painter is completely underrated. His
paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, in particular, are rare, and because they are seen occasionally
and in isolation, with no conception of their relationship with the rest of his work, even those who
regard themselves as interested in art often have no coherent overall understanding of Johnson as
a painter. Equally, the appreciation of art in Ireland is arguably at an early stage, celebrating an
easy narrative and commercialism at the expense of that which is more serious and less easy to
promote, so that it will take time for those who look at, exhibit and buy art to begin to appreciate
the qualities of his work.
It is, happily, on his substantial body of work, rather than on the fashions and whims of dealers
and collectors, that Nevill Johnson will eventually be judged as an artist. The consistent
questioning and exploration that drives his work ensures that it has a deep and enduring
humanity, to which we will always return. His psychological landscape, as well as his engagement
with the world, are relevant beyond their particular time and place, and are conveyed with a
deftness and directness that still resonates with the viewer.
Nevill Johnson l London 1978–1999 115