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John Wilson, 1922-2015
"This business of looking at people I latched onto when I was very young," John Wilson once noted. Wilson's 1944 self-portrait, drawn in lithographic crayon, reveals the twenty-two-year-old's assured draftsmanship and experience in modeling faces. He was initially taught to draw at the local boys' club, and although the chances of a poor young black artist succeeding seemed slim at the time, he enrolled in the school of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1939.
He ultimately graduated with highest honors and received a prestigious travel grant that enabled him to study modernism in Paris with Fernand Léger and learn about non-Western art forms. In his portraiture, Wilson probed beyond momentary expressions and personality quirks to hint at an interior essence. Admiring the Buddhas in the Boston Museum that "are quiet, still, but...have a spiritual force, an inner energy," he sought to express such universal human qualities in his own work.
1944
1944 |