Jonathan Boos

Sargent Claude Johnson

Sargent Claude Johnson was the first Black modern artist from the West Coast to achieve national recognition. Primarily known as a sculptor, Johnson had a significant body of work from a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, enamel work, and ceramics. Johnson was born to a large, mixedrace family; his mother was of African and Cherokee heritage, and his father was of Swedish descent. By the age of fourteen, Johnson’s parents had both died. The six orphaned children moved around between relatives in Washington DC, Massachusetts, and Chicago. One caretaker in Washington DC was the wife of his uncle, the notable sculptor May Howard Jackson, whose naturalistic bronze and clay busts of Black figures intrigued the young Johnson. In 1915, Johnson settled in the San Francisco bay area and studied at the California School of Fine Arts from 1919-1923, where he trained with sculptors Ralph Stackpole, Beniamino Bufano, and Maurice Stern. In 1923, Johnson moved to the East Bay and established his own studio.

Early in his career Johnson earned critical acclaim for his small-scale, figurative sculptures. Johnson was awarded prizes in both juried exhibitions and annual exhibitions hosted by the San Francisco Art Association. Johnson’s national reputation was bolstered by his participation in touring exhibitions of African American artwork through the Harmon Foundation in New York. Johnson enjoyed a long relationship with the Harmon Foundation, exhibiting with the organization from 1926 to 1939.

Johnson’s subjects from the 1920s and 1930s were influenced by The New Negro movement, which was advocated by the philosopher and writer Alain Locke in his 1925 publication. As the southern Black population migrated north, a vibrant cultural renaissance in the arts, poetry, music, theater, dance, film, and literature blossomed in New York City as well as other large urban centers in the Northeast. With this increased recognition, artists and writers questioned how African Americans should be portrayed in the arts. Locke encouraged artists to reflect on their African heritage when depicting black subjects, breaking with the traditional black stereotypes from previous years.

Johnson created a small series of masks in the early 1930s that exemplify the influential role of Locke and the cultural movement of the era. The copper masks were hand-hammered, using the techniques he learned as a studio assistant to Bufano. Johnson was inspired by traditional African masks, which he would have encountered in Locke’s 1925 publication that illustrated examples from the Barnes Foundation Collection, among others. The stylized African masks typically featured elongated faces and abstracted facial features. Johnson borrowed these traits and also modeled his masks on people he encountered in the Bay area. His masks demonstrate a sensitive portrayal of black subjects that asserted their dignity and humanity.

The present work was executed in 1933 and is an outstanding example of Johnson’s fusion of African forms and modernism. The copper and gilt mask is shaped as a narrow oval, with an elongated forehead, and hair fashioned in tight, stylized braids. Evoking traditional African masks and celebrating the physical characteristics of his subject, the mask features wide set eyes, large nose, and lips.

There are only nine known copper masks by Johnson and seven of them reside in museum collections, including three at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, one in the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and others in the Newark Museum of American Art, the Huntington, the Savannah College of Art and Design, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Johnson explored a range of subject matter and mediums as his career progressed. While working on largescale art projects for the New Deal, Johnson experimented with abstraction and found source material in Mexican murals. Johnson traveled twice to Mexico during the 1940s and 1960s, where he visited the murals of Mexican modernists and studied indigenous clay techniques. Johnson lived and worked in San Francisco until his death in 1967. The Oakland Museum assembled the first retrospective of his work in 1971, which solidified his reputation as an important American modernist. In 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a large exhibition of Johnson’s work and published the artist’s first comprehensive monograph. Most recently, Johnson was the subject of an exhibition at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in 2024.