Malvin Gray Johnson

Malvin Gray Johnson (born January 28, 1896, Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.—died October 4, 1934, New York City, New York) was an American artist who was one of the first African Americans to paint in the Cubist style. Malvin Gray Johnson used techniques derived from his studies of African sculpture to create paintings that depict the daily lives of Black people. Although Johnson’s work was much celebrated by art critics and historians for its portrayal of African Americans, so much attention was drawn to its subject matter that his remarkable painting style, which was influenced by both Cubism and French Impressionism, was often underappreciated or even ignored. In part because Johnson died at a young age, little is known about his life. Johnson’s paintings, however, have preserved his reputation as a major artist and have served as reminders of both the pride and suffering experienced by African Americans in the first decades of the 20th century, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–37) and the Great Depression (1929–c. 1939).

Johnson learned how to draw as a child, receiving his first drawing lessons and art supplies from his elder sister Maggie. He then produced paintings that regularly won awards in art competitions at annual fairs in his hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. When Johnson was 16 years old he and his family moved to New York City, where Johnson eventually enrolled at the National Academy of Design while working as a janitor and a clerk to pay his tuition. His studies at the academy were interrupted by his service in the U.S. Army in France during World War I (1914–18). Following his graduation, he worked as a commercial artist in New York.

Johnson received recognition as an important artist in 1929, when his painting Swing Low, Sweet Chariot was awarded the Otto H. Kahn prize (named for the German-born art patron and collector Otto Hermann Kahn) at an exhibition sponsored by the Harmon Foundation, a New York City organization devoted to supporting artistic, scientific, and other achievements of African Americans. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot portrays a group of African Americans gazing up at a cloud that is shaped like a chariot pulled by horses. The work was later reproduced for the February 1929 issue of The Crisis, a periodical published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The painting attests to Johnson’s interest in spirituals and other aspects of African American life in both rural and urban settings. These themes are also reflected in many of his other paintings, such as Roll, Jordan, Roll (1930), The Elks (1933), and The Postman (1934).

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On October 4, 1934, Johnson died unexpectedly of heart failure while preparing his own show for the Harmon Foundation. One year after his death, a memorial exhibition of 53 of his watercolor and oil paintings was held at the Delphic Studios in New York. His works have since been collected and displayed by numerous institutions around the United States, including the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.