Beschreibung:

Nevill Johnson (1911-1999)
Signature: signed lower left; signed and dated on reverse
Medium: oil on board
Size: 27 x 48in. (68.58 x 121.92cm) Provenance: Waddington's, Toronto, 14 June 2004, lot 176; Private collection Exhibited: Irish Exhibition of Living Art, 1953, catalogue no. 18 It is interesting to compare the photographic record of Dublin completed by Nevill Johnson in 1952-3 with his few surviving paintings of the period most directly inspired by the city around him and by its inhabitants. His affection for Dublin was tha...Read more It is interesting to compare the photographic record of Dublin completed by Nevill Johnson in 1952-3 with his few surviving paintings of the period most directly inspired by the city around him and by its inhabitants. His affection for Dublin was that of an outsider, an Englishman who had lived in Belfast for twelve years before moving there in 1946 in response to becoming one of the group of young artists whom Victor Waddington put under contract to his gallery. This independence allowed Johnson to respond to the specific places and sights of Dublin, including many that were under threat of vanishing, with personal empathy as well as with the eye of a surrealist. This group of nurses relaxing in a garden suggests a specific experience seen and recalled by the artist, but by reducing each figure to their uniform Johnson emphasises the abstract formal arrangements within the composition, as well as creating a dreamlike quality that is reinforced by a muted palette lifted by unexpected pink tones. We see a similar treatment in another major painting by Johnson from the same year, The Family, where the various circus performers are defined by the simple, flat shapes of their costumes. The critic of the Dublin Magazine wrote in 1952 that Johnson's paintings, 'though basically formal creations' contain 'at the same time an element of poetry which raise them far above the limitations of abstraction'. (1) Despite its theatricality, Johnson's surrealism of this period has an existential edge. Much as here the empty uniforms play out ambiguous, tense dramas, in other works Johnson transforms a folded paper bird or a piece of driftwood into a protagonist within a strange, otherworldly drama. The plants around the nurses in this minimally-described garden have sharp, pointed arabesques that are as elegantly and subtly unsettling as the stiff uniforms. Nurses is a painting that balances satisfying aesthetic qualities with the surreal incongruity that Johnson recalled so nostalgically from his Dublin years and creates an ambiguous and mysterious mood that seems to define the elusive tone of the post-war world. Dickon Hall, April 2019 Footnote: 1. 'Art Notes', Dublin Magazine, April-June 1952, p.37