1943 (ca.), William H. Johnson, Woman in Blue -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: Woman in Blue exemplifies Johnson's signature portrait style, in which a monumentalized figure is placed within a tightly cropped pictorial space defined by flat expanses of bold, thickly applied color. Here the unnamed sitter returns the viewer's gaze with a cool self-assurance, establishing her as both an observer and the observed. She nonetheless maintains a masklike inscrutability through which she asserts her own terms of engagement. This painting is a larger, more firmly rendered resolution of the expressionist strategies Johnson realized in an earlier study of the subject. Woman in Blue received careful conservation in recent months in order to close large surface cracks and to stabilize its unusual medium of oil paint on burlap.
1943 (ca.), William H. Johnson, Woman in Blue -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: Woman in Blue exemplifies Johnson's signature portrait style, in which a monumentalized figure is placed within a tightly cropped pictorial space defined by flat expanses of bold, thickly applied color. Here the unnamed sitter returns the viewer's gaze with a cool self-assurance, establishing her as both an observer and the observed. She nonetheless maintains a masklike inscrutability through which she asserts her own terms of engagement. This painting is a larger, more firmly rendered resolution of the expressionist strategies Johnson realized in an earlier study of the subject. Woman in Blue received careful conservation in recent months in order to close large surface cracks and to stabilize its unusual medium of oil paint on burlap.