WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) BORDER LANDSCAPE II - C.1975 Signed with initials lower right, red and black ink on paper 54cm x 73cm (21.25in x 28.75in)
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) STANDING STONE - 1976 Signed and dated 1976 verso, oil on canvas 95cm x 84.5cm (37.5in x 33.25in) Exhibited: William Johnston Exhibition, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) MOVEMENT IN BLACK I - 1967 Signed and dated lower right, ink 33.75cm x 23cm (13.25in x 9in) The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) MOVEMENT IN BLACK II - 1975 Signed and dated '75 lower right, ink 78.5cm x 58.5cm (31in x 23in) The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) LANDSCAPE TORSO - 1971 Signed with initials and dated '71 lower right, ink and wash 23cm x 15.25 (9in x 6in) The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, cat.no.22
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) BLACK AND RED II - 1975 Signed and dated '75 lower right, red and black ink 78cm x 59cm (30.75in x 23.25in) The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) AFTER BOMB DAMAGE Signed, inscribed and dated 1929-1969 verso, oil on canvas 136cm x 244cm (53.5in x 96in) Lyon and Turnbull are pleased to offer After Bomb Damage (1929-69) by William Johnstone, one of the most monumental oils by the artist to appear on the market for some time. Johnstone was known to re-visit and re-work his oils overs years, or even decades, as is the case here. As Dr Beth Williamson notes, the scale, initial dates, darkness and subject of this painting sits well with other paintings by Johnstone such as A Point in Time and Golgotha, Johnstone’s most noted masterworks. Indeed, it seems positioned somewhere between these two in terms of palette and tone with hints of the blues of A Point in Time and the geometric shapes of Golgotha. Williamson highlights the important role of Johnstone’s fascination with the concept of time, postulating that this fed into his methodology of re-visiting and making additions to artworks across several years. It is known he explored different perspectives of how we understand time such as J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment in Time (1927) and Percy Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man (1927).1929, the date this painting was begun, was of course the year of the Wall Street Crash. The economic collapse put paid to Johnstone’s ambitions to settle in America, forcing he and his first wife Flora’s return to Scotland initially, and latterly London. It has also been said to mark a period which saw him begin to turn away from his art practice in disillusionment. Johnstone was a staunch individualist, opposed to conforming to the dictates of his dealers. An ideologue and an innovator, he discovered instead a passion for teaching, holding the position of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1945 and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts until the 1960s.Dr Williamson notes that both A Point in Time and Golgotha are anti-war paintings, and the title of this work would seem to place it within the same body of work. Johnstone’s art is in essence deeply psychological, and in his painting one can perhaps perceive the reverberating impact of World War 1. Though Johnstone was fortunate not to see active service, the residual trauma that affected the nation and the seismic break in the order of things left a deep mark on the artist. 1929 accelerated a crumbling in the sense of order; the looming spectre of further global unrest beginning to take form. When Johnstone returned to this painting latterly in the 60s, he would also have seen plenty of the titular bomb damage first hand. Johnstone held the post of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1946. During WWII the Junior School was evacuated (1941-42), first to Chipstead and later to Northampton with other students from the school, although Printing continued. Johnstone reopened the school in the autumn of 1943, and there are student accounts of it as badly bombed, poorly lit and cold. We are grateful to the kind assistance of Dr Beth Williamson in cataloging this lot. Her cultural biography of William Johnstone is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) METAMORPHOSIS - C.1970-73 Plaster bas-relief 127cm x 96.5cm x 11.5cm (50in x 38in x 4.5in) Exhibited:‘Genesis: New Works in Plaster’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1973 ‘Painters in Parallel’, cat. no. 123, The Scottish Arts Council, 1978 If you have had the pleasure of visiting the long-anticipated, newly re-opened Scottish Art wing at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh (re-opened 2023), the first painting you are likely to have set eyes on is the monumental masterpiece ‘A Point in Time’ (1921/37) by William Johnstone. The huge canvas is a formidable sight; with abstract twists of black, blues and greens creating fathomless caverns. It is hung against a bold, blood-red wall immediately facing the entrance. In this phenomenal artwork the curators of the National Galleries found the key visual within the collection to challenge tired perceptions. The re-hang’s opening statement could not be clearer: 20th century Scottish art was seriously accomplished, outward-looking and Modern with a capital ‘M’. This curatorial choice also elevates Johnstone himself emphatically and with purpose; literally centralising his significance within the story of Scottish art – not to say international modernism - as never before. Born in the Borders in 1897 to a farming background, Johnstone, a powerful personality, mixed with other radical thinkers in the Edinburgh College of Art in the 1920s. Alongside the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Johnstone was pivotal within the conception of the “Scottish Renaissance”. This was a cultural movement spanning art and literature that looked to move away from the perceived stagnancy of the centralised British cultural self-view, advocating instead a modernisation - and independence - of Scottish political and cultural values. Though Johnstone’s origins were immutably tied to the Scottish landscape, his burgeoning career soon took a decisively international direction. In 1925 he was awarded a Carnegie Travelling Scholarship which enabled him to study in Paris with André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, as well as the Atelier Colarossi. In 1926 he travelled further afield to Spain, Italy and North Africa, accompanied by Max Bernd-Cohen, an American lawyer-turned-artist who become a lifelong friend. His circle of acquaintances in Paris at that time included the artists Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, and the eminent collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1927, Johnstone married the American sculptor Flora MacDonald, spending subsequent years in America and Scotland. They settled in London in the 1930s, with intermittent teaching commitments enabling him to return to America sporadically for the next twenty years. Indeed, it was teaching that became his major life’s work and he was no less innovative within this field than within his art practice. He held the position of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1945 and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In this capacity he is credited with evolving the ideologies of each school, bringing them more in line with Continental art and design principles akin to the Bauhaus and creating teaching opportunities for exciting young avant-garde artists including Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Alan Davie and Eduardo Paolozzi. His services to education within the arts earned him an O.B.E. Sojourns teaching in America included positions as Fulbright Lecturer and Director of the Colorado Springs Fine Art Centre Summer School. He also lectured at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Taliesin, Wisconsin, in 1949 and 1950. Johnstone’s friend and colleague, the artist and theorist Anton Ehrenzweig, identified three stylistic phases in Johnstone’s painting career. Firstly, a surrealist phase of the 1930s, a cubist phase of the 1940s and finally his calligraphic or tachist phase of the 1950s. ‘Dark Borders Landscape’, dated 1925, can be read as a psychological take on the Scottish landscape; a brooding, abstract suggestion of elemental forces, mood and place. His Borders landscapes are often executed in the darkest of tones, as here. Art historian Beth Williamson has suggested a psychological interpretation of the tumultuous dreichness inherent within these early Scottish landscapes; perceiving a troubled relationship with the soil he and his kin sprang from and laboured over so tirelessly, but which offered only the scantest living in return. She also notes the sense of alienation Johnstone felt upon his return to his home farm after having been conscripted in World War I. Despite fortunately never seeing active duty, the distress caused by the exposure to traumatised front-line soldiers, paired with the sense of his own fate hanging perilously in the balance while waiting for the call up, forever changed the young artist. Even as early as the 1920s, Johnstone had developed an innovative and unique paint application that embraced expressive, totally intuitive brushwork. This expressionistic take on abstraction - “dripping” his paint as early as the 1920s - latterly saw his work referred to in the context of American Abstract Expressionism (the so-called “action painters”). Johnstone’s work in fact pre-figures this school of artists and his approach has, as Ehrenzweig indicated, much more in common with the ‘automatic drawing’ techniques of the Parisian Surrealist school in Paris: psychological forces made tangible in paint. The goal of Johnstone’s art practice was to assimilate his interests and fields of influence to totally unique effect, evolving an entirely personal style. His reference points were diverse but always drawn to that which is distilled and instinctual over pre-meditated: from the Pictish carving of his Scottish homeland to the New Mexico school, and from Asian calligraphy to Primitivism and the artwork of children. At the heart of his paintings, whatever the period, you will always find expressive, intuitive mark-making.This creative belief-system was extrapolated to its extreme in the plaster relief series he created in 1970, as an elderly man. In these works, from one of the most celebrated decades of his artistic career, the physical and metaphysical combine to create extraordinary sculptural objects that read as simultaneously ancient and futuristic. “The earth has been a very great creative mother for the artist, the poet, the composer; but the material of the soil can produce its own art. With these thoughts I made my plaster reliefs in order to find confirmation of my conviction that the medium of plaster would itself reveal its own miracle. I knew that in myself I must produce a condition, relaxed and free from thought or deliberation; that which would be produced through my hands would then be from my inner self and be completely unconscious. I throw the lump of crude, wet plaster on the smooth polished surface; a gesture pf creation... and the plaster sets.” – William Johnstone, in the catalogue introduction for ‘Genesis’, ten plaster reliefs exhibited by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1973.
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) DARK BORDERS LANDSCAPE -1925 Signed and dated to canvas verso, oil on canvas 63.5cm x 76cm (25in x 30in) If you have had the pleasure of visiting the long-anticipated, newly re-opened Scottish Art wing at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh (re-opened 2023), the first painting you are likely to have set eyes on is the monumental masterpiece ‘A Point in Time’ (1921/37) by William Johnstone. The huge canvas is a formidable sight; with abstract twists of black, blues and greens creating fathomless caverns. It is hung against a bold, blood-red wall immediately facing the entrance. In this phenomenal artwork the curators of the National Galleries found the key visual within the collection to challenge tired perceptions. The re-hang’s opening statement could not be clearer: 20th century Scottish art was seriously accomplished, outward-looking and Modern with a capital ‘M’. This curatorial choice also elevates Johnstone himself emphatically and with purpose; literally centralising his significance within the story of Scottish art – not to say international modernism - as never before. Born in the Borders in 1897 to a farming background, Johnstone, a powerful personality, mixed with other radical thinkers in the Edinburgh College of Art in the 1920s. Alongside the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Johnstone was pivotal within the conception of the “Scottish Renaissance”. This was a cultural movement spanning art and literature that looked to move away from the perceived stagnancy of the centralised British cultural self-view, advocating instead a modernisation - and independence - of Scottish political and cultural values. Though Johnstone’s origins were immutably tied to the Scottish landscape, his burgeoning career soon took a decisively international direction. In 1925 he was awarded a Carnegie Travelling Scholarship which enabled him to study in Paris with André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, as well as the Atelier Colarossi. In 1926 he travelled further afield to Spain, Italy and North Africa, accompanied by Max Bernd-Cohen, an American lawyer-turned-artist who become a lifelong friend. His circle of acquaintances in Paris at that time included the artists Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, and the eminent collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1927, Johnstone married the American sculptor Flora MacDonald, spending subsequent years in America and Scotland. They settled in London in the 1930s, with intermittent teaching commitments enabling him to return to America sporadically for the next twenty years. Indeed, it was teaching that became his major life’s work and he was no less innovative within this field than within his art practice. He held the position of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1945 and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In this capacity he is credited with evolving the ideologies of each school, bringing them more in line with Continental art and design principles akin to the Bauhaus and creating teaching opportunities for exciting young avant-garde artists including Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Alan Davie and Eduardo Paolozzi. His services to education within the arts earned him an O.B.E. Sojourns teaching in America included positions as Fulbright Lecturer and Director of the Colorado Springs Fine Art Centre Summer School. He also lectured at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Taliesin, Wisconsin, in 1949 and 1950. Johnstone’s friend and colleague, the artist and theorist Anton Ehrenzweig, identified three stylistic phases in Johnstone’s painting career. Firstly, a surrealist phase of the 1930s, a cubist phase of the 1940s and finally his calligraphic or tachist phase of the 1950s. ‘Dark Borders Landscape’, dated 1925, can be read as a psychological take on the Scottish landscape; a brooding, abstract suggestion of elemental forces, mood and place. His Borders landscapes are often executed in the darkest of tones, as here. Art historian Beth Williamson has suggested a psychological interpretation of the tumultuous dreichness inherent within these early Scottish landscapes; perceiving a troubled relationship with the soil he and his kin sprang from and laboured over so tirelessly, but which offered only the scantest living in return. She also notes the sense of alienation Johnstone felt upon his return to his home farm after having been conscripted in World War I. Despite fortunately never seeing active duty, the distress caused by the exposure to traumatised front-line soldiers, paired with the sense of his own fate hanging perilously in the balance while waiting for the call up, forever changed the young artist. Even as early as the 1920s, Johnstone had developed an innovative and unique paint application that embraced expressive, totally intuitive brushwork. This expressionistic take on abstraction - “dripping” his paint as early as the 1920s - latterly saw his work referred to in the context of American Abstract Expressionism (the so-called “action painters”). Johnstone’s work in fact pre-figures this school of artists and his approach has, as Ehrenzweig indicated, much more in common with the ‘automatic drawing’ techniques of the Parisian Surrealist school in Paris: psychological forces made tangible in paint. The goal of Johnstone’s art practice was to assimilate his interests and fields of influence to totally unique effect, evolving an entirely personal style. His reference points were diverse but always drawn to that which is distilled and instinctual over pre-meditated: from the Pictish carving of his Scottish homeland to the New Mexico school, and from Asian calligraphy to Primitivism and the artwork of children. At the heart of his paintings, whatever the period, you will always find expressive, intuitive mark-making.This creative belief-system was extrapolated to its extreme in the plaster relief series he created in 1970, as an elderly man. In these works, from one of the most celebrated decades of his artistic career, the physical and metaphysical combine to create extraordinary sculptural objects that read as simultaneously ancient and futuristic. “The earth has been a very great creative mother for the artist, the poet, the composer; but the material of the soil can produce its own art. With these thoughts I made my plaster reliefs in order to find confirmation of my conviction that the medium of plaster would itself reveal its own miracle. I knew that in myself I must produce a condition, relaxed and free from thought or deliberation; that which would be produced through my hands would then be from my inner self and be completely unconscious. I throw the lump of crude, wet plaster on the smooth polished surface; a gesture pf creation... and the plaster sets.” – William Johnstone, in the catalogue introduction for ‘Genesis’, ten plaster reliefs exhibited by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1973.
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE ABSTRACT STUDY Ink wash 34.5cm x 24cm (13.75in x 9.5in) Christie's Glasgow, The Studio of the late Dr. William Johnstone O.B.E.,12th April 1990Graeme Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow
William Johnstone OBE (British, 1897-1981) Near Toledo, Spain signed, titled and indistinctly dedicated ' To ---/from/W Johnstone/'Near Toledo, Spain' ' to label (verso) oil on canvas 38 x 46.5cm (14 15/16 x 18 5/16in).
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) THE EILDON HILLS Oil on canvas (86cm x 111cm (33.75in x 43.75in)) Exhibited: Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 'William Johnstone,' 1981.
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) DARK HILLS (ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE) - 1925 Signed and dated verso, oil on canvas (62.5cm x 75.5cm (24.5in x 29.75in)) Exhibited: Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 'William Johnstone,' 1981
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) ODALISQUE Signed lower right, inscribed with title verso, and two further drawings, each signed lower right (each 78cm x 58.25cm (30.75in x 22.75in), unframed) Qty: (3)
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) THREE ABSTRACT INK DRAWINGS Each signed lower right, ink on paper (each 42cm x 29.75cm (16.5in x 11.75in), unframed) Qty: (3)
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) DARK HILLS (ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE) - 1925 Signed and dated verso, oil on canvas (62.5cm x 75.5cm (24.5in x 29.75in)) Exhibited: Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 'William Johnstone,' 1981
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) THE EILDON HILLS Oil on canvas (86cm x 111cm (33.75in x 43.75in)) Exhibited: Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 'William Johnstone,' 1981.
Attributed to William Johnstone (1897-1981) Scottish, an untitled landscape, watercolour, with John Mathieson Gallery label verso, 9.25" x 13.25", (23 x 34cm).
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) UNTITLED (ABSTRACT I) Pen and ink, and a companion, 'Untitled (Abstracted Landscape)', pen and ink (18.5cm x 29cm (7.5in x 11.5in); 22xm x 28.25cm (8.75in x 11in)) Qty: (2)
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) PICNEE Signed lower left, charcoal drawing (24.5cm x 22cm (9.5in x 8.75in)) Provenance: Duncan Miller Fine Arts
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) VIOLET - 1922 Indistinctly signed lower left, inscribed and dated verso, oil on canvas (91cm x 70.5cm (36in x 27.75in))
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) WORKSHOP -1920 Signed, dated and indistinctly inscribed verso, oil on canvas (75cm x 59.5cm (29.5in x 23.5in))
Attributed to William Johnstone (1897-1981) Scottish, an untitled landscape, watercolour, with John Mathieson Gallery label verso, 9.25" x 13.25" (23 x 34cm).
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) DARK HILLS (ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE) - 1925 Signed and dated verso, oil on canvas (62.5cm x 75.5cm (24.5in x 29.75in)) Exhibited: Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 'William Johnstone,' 1981
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) COMPOSITION Signed verso, oil on canvas (81cm x 140cm (32in x 55in)) Provenance: By direct descent from the artist to the current owner
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) UNTITLED (ABSTRACT WITH CIRCLES) Signed faintly with initials in red pen lower right, ink on paper (76cm x 56cm (30in x 22in))
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) UNTITLED Signed with monogram in red ink lower right, ink and wash (75cm x 55cm (29.5in x 21.5in)) Provenance: William Johnstone Studio Sale
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) UNTITLED Signed with monogram in red lower left, ink and wash (74cm x 54cm (29in x 21.25in)) Provenance: William Johnstone Studio Sale
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981) COMPOSITION Oil on board (51cm x 76cm (20in x 30in)) From the collection of the late Dr Angus Gibson, to be sold to support the University of Edinburgh Art Collection
§ WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (BRITISH 1897-1981) UNTITLED Indistinctly signed and dated, oil on canvas (20.7cm x 22.5cm (8.25in x 8.75in)) Provenance: Given by the artist to the current owner's mother
