Portrait of Ellen Johnson

Ellen Johnson (1910-1992), Oberlin College art librarian, professor of art, honorary curator of modern art at the AMAM, and pioneer scholar of postwar American art, sat for this portrait in spring 1976. By this time, Johnson had studied Alice Neel's work fairly extensively and was fascinated by the unconventional artist, who had a turbulent personal life. In the early 1930s, Neel was admitted to a mental hospital after a breakdown following the collapse of her marriage and death of her daughter. The powerfully expressive drawings she made at this time, and her later portraits of New York artists, family, friends, and neighbors were uniquely expressive and iconoclastic.

Johnson's sitting took place in Neel's Spanish Harlem apartment in New York City over a period of several weeks that Johnson described as "strenuous." During one session, Johnson recalled, her legs were so numb that when she tried to stand up, her ankle crumpled beneath her, causing her to fall. Despite the long hours of patient sitting required, the finished work is fully alive with Johnson's curiosity, forthrightness, and intensity.

Working quickly and without preparatory drawings, Neel sketched directly on the canvas, capturing the vitality of the sitter through her lively and deft brushwork. Johnson documented each stage of the painting in a series of slides and described the experience in her 1993 memoirs Fragments Recalled at Eighty: The Art Memoirs of Ellen H. Johnson:

It was fascinating to watch her work, absolutely directly, no preliminary sketch. She simply loaded the brush with a thin solution of oil paint and turpentine and quickly drew the outline of the whole thing. Mostly, for the sketch she picked up blue paint, occasionally ochre. She then began building the work up more slowly, but still with positive strokes, no fumbling.

Neel told Johnson that she wouldn't like the portrait "because I'm making you look a little askew. But you are a little askew; you certainly aren't square." The portrait's slight off-balance appearance is apparent in the turn of Johnson's body, caused perhaps by the way she crossed her legs and twisted a bit as she pushed back in the chair. Her pose was more or less set by Neel, who asked Johnson to cross her legs and move around until she found the position Neel was looking for.

The incisive three-quarter-length portrait is finished with great attention to detail in the hands and in Johnson's earrings and costume. Johnson especially liked Neel's treatment of her hands, remarking that they were individual and expressive.

In addition to this portrait commemorating Johnson's retirement, Oberlin College and the AMAM recognized her remarkable thirty-nine-year career by naming the museum's Ellen Johnson Gallery in her honor. Funded by Johnson's Oberlin College friend Ruth Roush (OC 1934), the gallery displays the AMAM's contemporary art, serving as a reminder both of the groundbreaking contributions Johnson made to the field and of the important art that was acquired during her tenure.