Buffie Johnson, Artist and Friend of Artists

[Hyfler/Rosner]

September 2, 2006
NY Times
Margalit Fox

Her work and a great photo of the artist at 90:
http://www.anitashapolskygallery.com/johnson.html

Buffie Johnson, Artist and Friend of Artists, Dies at 94

Buffie Johnson, a painter whose work spanned much of the
20th century and ranged from Surrealism to Abstract
Expressionism to larger-than-life hyperrealism, died on Aug.
11 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, said
Joan Schenkar, a friend.

Ms. Johnson, who began showing her paintings in the 1930's,
continued to exhibit until the end of her life. In 2002, in
honor of her 90th birthday, she was the subject of a
one-woman show at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York.
Last year, the gallery featured her work as part of its
group exhibition "Betty Parsons and the Women."

A woman of independent means, Ms. Johnson was by all
accounts a woman of sociable temperament, and her life was
intertwined with those of some of the 20th century's leading
artists, writers and performers. Over the years, she
befriended, socialized with or otherwise brushed up against
a cast of luminaries including Paul and Jane Bowles, Truman
Capote, Willem de Kooning, Lawrence Durrell, Greta Garbo,
Patricia Highsmith, Gene Krupa, Gypsy Rose Lee, Robert
Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko,
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Gore Vidal and Andy
Warhol.

In her work, Ms. Johnson was concerned with the intersection
of spiritualism, myth and symbol. Deeply influenced by the
psychiatrist Carl Jung, whom she also befriended, she wrote
"Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her
Sacred Animals," published by Harper & Row in 1988.

Buffie Johnson was born in New York City on Feb. 20, 1912.
After studying at the University of California, Los Angeles,
she embarked for Europe, where she trained with the noted
painters Francis Picabia and Stanley William Hayter. In
1943, she was included in an exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's
New York gallery, Art of This Century, which featured the
work of 31 women.

After an early marriage that ended in divorce, Ms. Johnson
married the writer and critic Gerald Sykes, from whom she
was later divorced. Their daughter, Jenny Johnson Sykes, of
Nyack, N.Y., is her only immediate survivor.

Ms. Johnson's earliest works tended toward the Surrealist;
then came more abstract canvases of intense color and pure
form. In later years, she turned to huge realistic paintings
of flowers and other plant forms, which were imbued with
texture through their profuse, veiny detail.

In the late 1950's, Ms. Johnson was commissioned to paint a
huge abstract mural for the Astor Theater on Broadway at
45th Street. Comprising more than 200 45-foot-high panels,
the mural, in deep blues, evoked the city at night. The
panels were returned to her when the theater was demolished
in 1982.

Her work is in the collections of major museums, including
the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the
Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Ms. Johnson sometimes figured in the work of her celebrated
friends - she was photographed by Edward Weston, André
Kertesz and Karl Bissinger - and they sometimes figured in
hers. One of her best-known paintings from the 1940's is a
portrait of Tennessee Williams.

It was an association Ms. Johnson came to regret after she
let Williams stay in her house. He used the good china when
he wasn't supposed to.