Lee Johnson; leading authority on Delacroix who produced a six-volume catalogue raisonné of the artist's work
Hyfler/Rosner
Leading authority on Delacroix who produced a six-volume
catalogue raisonné of the artist's work
The Independent
10 August 2006
Chris Michaelides
Lee Johnson was the leading authority on the French Romantic
painter Eugène Delacroix. His first monograph on Delacroix
was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1963, the
centenary year of the artist's death. Delacroix remains one
of the best introductions to his art, subject-matter and
technique.
Johnson was also responsible for the selection of works and
for the catalogue entries of two exhibitions that framed the
great commemorative manifestations organised in France in
1963. The first was shown in Toronto and Ottawa between
December 1962 and February 1963 and included 45 works,
mostly from North American collections. The second
exhibition, in 1964, was held at the Royal Scottish Academy,
Edinburgh and then at the Royal Academy, London; with its
201 works, it remains the largest exhibition on Delacroix
ever organised in Great Britain. Johnson's detailed and
exemplary entries for each painting clearly show that the
seeds for his magnum opus, a catalogue raisonné of
Delacroix's paintings, had already been sown.
A catalogue raisonné of Delacroix's entire output had been
compiled by Alfred Robaut in 1885, and a summary one by
Luigi Bortolatto in 1972. However, a new catalogue, which
would provide a detailed critical assessment of Delacroix's
paintings, incorporate changes of attribution and new
discoveries, including many by Johnson himself, was now
necessary.
The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: a critical catalogue was
published by Oxford University Press in three instalments of
two volumes each, one for the text and one for the plates.
The first two volumes came out in 1981, covering the period
prior to the artist's journey to Morocco in 1832, and
including the Salon paintings of the 1820s which established
Delacroix as one of the greatest artists of the Romantic
generation. Volumes three and four (1986), devoted to
movable pictures and private decorations executed by
Delacroix between 1832 and 1863, won Johnson, in 1987, the
prestigious Mitchell Prize (awarded every other year to a
book in English that makes an outstanding and original
contribution to the study of the visual arts). The final
volumes (1989) dealt with the public decorations and their
sketches.
It is indicative of the nature of Delacroix studies, and
also of the integrity and meticulousness of Johnson that
volume three also contained the first supplement to the
works already catalogued in the first two volumes. Another
three of these supplements were published later, the last
one in 2002. They record the later known ownership changes
of pictures, complete their histories and provide
photographs of paintings that have since come to light. They
also include several revisions of opinions of authenticity,
either upgrading or downgrading attributions. It is all the
more remarkable that Johnson carried out this mammoth task
single-handedly without research assistants.
Alongside the catalogue, Johnson wrote extensively on
Delacroix and French art. Delacroix Pastels (1995)
complemented the catalogue of the paintings, surveying all
the extant pastels of the artist as well as listing all
recorded but unlocated works. There were also two editions
of newly discovered letters, Eugène Delacroix: further
correspondence 1817-1863 (1991) and Nouvelles lettres (2000,
with Michèle Hannoosh).
For nearly five decades, Johnson also contributed articles,
notices and reviews in scholarly journals like The
Burlington Magazine (some 45 articles between 1954 and
2003), Apollo, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, The Art Bulletin, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Revue
du Louvre, Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de l'Art
Français and The J.Paul Getty Museum Journal. These often
announced new discoveries of works or corrected previous
errors and attributions.
Notable among these were the articles on his rediscovery in
situ of the mural decorations Delacroix executed for the
dining-room of the actor Talma and on other early decorative
schemes, which provided a more complete picture of
Delacroix's early work and activities in the period leading
up to his first public success at the Salon of 1822 with
Dante et Virgile aux Enfers. A volume bringing together a
selection of Lee Johnson's articles, and his authoritative
book and exhibition reviews on Delacroix and, to a lesser
extent, Géricault, Bonington and other artists of the
Romantic generation, would be invaluable to students of
19th-century art.
He was born in London in 1924, the elder of two children of
Tommaso Bruno Bertuccioli and Carol Johnson. His father, a
native of Pesaro, owned, at various times, a button factory,
a silkworm factory, and an Italian grocery in Soho. His
mother was from Uncasville, Connecticut and she met his
father while studying drama in London. The family lived in
Kent, at Farnborough and Lee was educated at the King's
School, Canterbury and then at the Edinburgh Academy.
In 1940 he moved with his sister and mother to the United
States, apparently on one of the last evacuation ships to
leave England. He later joined the US Army, serving in a
medical corps in the Pacific. It seems that his interests
turned towards the study of art when he returned to England
after the Second World War. He had, by then, following his
parents' divorce, adopted his mother's surname.
After study in Paris and Perugia, he was admitted, in 1952,
to the Courtauld Institute of Art to undertake an Academic
Diploma in the History of European Art. He was taught at the
Courtauld by Anthony Blunt who steered his researches
towards the French art of the early 19th-century which was,
as Lorenz Eitner wrote in 1954, "still a Dark Age in the
history of art" . Upon graduation from the Courtauld, and
with Blunt's support, Johnson was awarded a French
government scholarship to spend a year in Paris to do
research on Delacroix.
His postgraduate work at King's College, Cambridge, between
1955 and 1958, resulted in his PhD thesis "Colour in
Delacroix: theory and practice" (1959), also supervised by
Blunt. By the end of his time in Cambridge Johnson had
already established himself, through lecturing (from 1956)
at the Courtauld and publishing a series of remarkable
articles on Delacroix and Géricault in The Burlington
Magazine, as an authority in early-19th-century French art.
In 1958 he went for a year to the Department of Fine Art,
University of Toronto, and the following year he taught at
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, returning to Toronto, to
take up a lectureship there, in 1960. He became Assistant
Professor in 1963 and Professor in 1973. During this period
he taught for half the academic year in Toronto, and for the
other half at Cambridge. He was appointed Professor Emeritus
on his early retirement in 1984. Besides French art, he
taught courses on 18th-century English watercolour painting.
He was an inspirational teacher, with a great knowledge of
various techniques, and his former students include numerous
eminent art historians, curators and art dealers.
In the 1990s Johnson contributed to the catalogues of
several Delacroix exhibitions: "Eugène Delacroix, 1798-1863:
paintings, drawings, and prints from North American
collections" in New York (1991), " Delacroix: le voyage au
Maroc" in Paris (1994-95) and three exhibitions in 1998
celebrating the bicentenary of Delacroix's birth - "Eugène
Delacroix ou la naissance d'un nouveau romantisme" (in
Rouen), " Delacroix: les dernières années" (in Paris and
then Philadelphia) and "Delacroix en Touraine" (Tours).
Exhibition organisers, especially in France, felt that his
contributions added a seal of authority to their
undertakings. Official recognition in France came in 2000
when he was made Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres, a title he much preferred to the more elevated but
less romantic-sounding one of Officier which had been
originally proposed to him.
He received, however, no official honours in his own
country. Indeed, he was sometimes disappointed when he felt
that his work had not been duly recognised as, for example,
when he was not asked to contribute to the exhibition
"Constable to Delacroix: British art and the French
Romantics, 1820-1840" at Tate Britain in 2003, though a
significant part of his researches concerned British and
French artistic relations in the early 19th century. This
was, in fact, the last exhibition he ever visited. He was,
by then, suffering from Churg-Strauss Syndrome, an illness
he bore with great stoicism and which had rendered him
housebound since 2001.
His interest in art remained undiminished to the very end;
he was always adding new material to his archive, reading
voraciously, and eager to hear about new exhibitions. The
death of his beloved wife Michelle in 2002 was a terrible
blow and it is a measure of his great courage and
determination that, despite his frail state, he undertook a
long and complicated journey to her native village in
theVendée region in France in order to disperse her ashes
and place a plaque in her memory.
It is not surprising that a scholar of such fastidious
methodology was occasionally impatient with "Gallic
effusions" - the marginalia in his personal copy of the
facsimile edition of Delacroix's Moroccan sketchbooks
include a few "Blah, blah, blah"s - and he was not averse to
vigorously argued criticism, however highly placed his
opponent. He also disliked, and distanced himself from, the
more extreme manifestations of "new" art history.
He was regularly consulted by dealers and collectors alike
and, though he was always happy to assist with provenance
questions and in authenticating works, his endurance was
often tested by the persistent and unreasonable demands of
hopeful owners. Above all he was offended by unjust
criticism of " the Master". Only days before his death, he
was enraged by Brian Sewell's description, in his review of
the National Gallery's current exhibition, of Delacroix's
smaller paintings as "squidgy" and "repellent" .
Witty, entirely without self-importance, he was wonderful
company. Friends remember with affection the Johnsons'
generous hospitality in their cottage in Abington (near
Cambridge) and, in later years, in Caversham and in London.
In a somewhat melancholy note, in the preface of the fourth
supplement to his catalogue, referring to the recently
auctioned and dispersed Alfred Piron and Claude Roger-Marx
archives, Johnson writes,
Although I have drawn on [these] archives in compiling this
supplement, I have made no attempt fully to assimilate these
vast new resources now dispersed among a variety of
locations, and to collate them with Delacroix's entire
painted oeuvre. This task I must leave to a younger
generation of scholars.
The younger generation of scholars will have a hard task to
measure up to, let alone surpass, Lee Johnson's
achievements.
Lee Frederick Johnson, art historian: born London 7
September 1924; Lecturer in the History of Art, University
of Toronto 1960-63, Assistant Professor 1963-73, Professor
1973-84 (Emeritus); married Michelle Andrée Combes (died
2002; one son); died London 6 July 2006.