Lot 149: DANIEL LARUE JOHNSON

B. 1938
HOMAGE TO RENÉ D'HARNONCOURT

measurements
58 1/2 by 30 5/8 by 20 in.

alternate measurements
148.6 by 77.8 by 50.8 cm.

acrylic on wood

executed in 1968

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owners in 1970

EXHIBITED

Museum of Modern Art, New York, Homage to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968
New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, April 5 - July 2, 2006

LITERATURE

Patricia Coffin, 'Black Artist in a White Art World', Look, Jan. 7, 1969, p. 66-69, illustrated p. 66
Elsa Honig Fine, The Afro-American Artist, New York, 1973, Plate 33, facing page 259
The Studio Museum in Harlem, Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980, New York, 2006, p. 17, illustrated p. 66

NOTE

Johnson emerged from the troubled environment of Los Angeles' Watts district via a period of study at the Chouinard School and a Guggenheim Fellowship, which paid for a stay in Paris, where he studied briefly with Alberto Giacometti.
Works from the earlier 1960s are dark assemblages which resemble Rauschenberg's 'Combines' and address - or, rather, confront - the Civil Rights issues which virtually monopolized African-American discourse during this time.
The present work belongs to a group of brightly-colored, glossy-surfaced wood constructions belonging to the late 1960s. These works stand at the artist's self-created intersection of color-field painting, minimalist sculpture and African sources of color. Homage to René d'Harnoncourt was included in the exhibtion at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., following his death in 1968; controversial not just because of its title (referencing the museum's director and not the slain Civil Rights leader), but because its very nature defied definition: one critic observed that it was a painting that seems to float above the f