Education
Courtauld Institute of Artist
Courtauld Institute of Artist
Born in 1924 in London, Johnson emigrated to the United States of America in 1940 and served with the United States Army in the Pacific. Between 1952 and 1958 he was a student at the Courtauld Institute of Artist During this period, he fortuitously discovered four unattributed Delacroix decorative paintings in the town house of François-Joseph Talma in Paris.
The centenary of Delacroix’s death was the occasion of a 1962-1963 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (renamed in 1966 as the Art Gallery of Ontario) which Johnson curated and catalogued.
The director of the gallery noted in the preface that the catalogue contained a "considerable amount of material which not only appears for the first time but also corrects previous errors". He went on to curate and catalogue the Delacroix exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival of 1964 where 201 works were displayed.
Johnson’s Catalogue of the works of Delacroix is one of his most significant contributions to art scholarship. The first volume of this catalogue was released in 1981, and the final supplement was released in 2002.
The entire catalogue consists of six large books, with four supplements.
The catalogue was highly acclaimed, two of the volumes winning the Mitchell Prize for the History of Artist After having worked extensively on Delacroix, and to a lesser degree on Géricault, Bonington and Anglo-French artistic links in the 1820s, Johnson retired in 1984. He was appointed Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2000.
He had by this time written a number of scholarly books, and his writing had appeared in journals including 45 articles between 1954 and 2003 in The Burlington Magazine, as well as other articles in Apollo, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, The Art Bulletin, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Revue du Louvre, Bulletin de la Société de l"Histoire de l"Art Français and The J.Paul Getty Museum Journal.
Many of these articles contained new or clarificatory information. University of Glasgow Art Historian Ronald Pickvance, commenting on the work of Lee Johnson, said "The way we comprehend Delacroix will never be the same because of the contribution he has made.".
Quotations: "The way we comprehend Delacroix will never be the same because of the contribution he has made.".