Sowing

Date: 1940
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1967/1967.59.1002_1a.jpg?itok=ET_TKLsj width="328" height="278" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/sowing-12027"]] || Title: **Sowing**

Artist: **William H. Johnson** Born: Florence, South Carolina 1901 Died: Central Islip, New York 1970

Medium: oil on burlap Dimensions: 38 1/2 x 45 3/4 in. (97.8 x 116.2 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the Harmon Foundation

Accession: 1967.59.1002 || "And even if I have studied for many years and all over the world,...I have still been able to preserve the primitive in me...My aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me." -- William H. Johnson
 * Exhibition Label: **

One of the most brilliant yet tragic careers of an early twentieth-century African-American artist was that of William H. Johnson. Originally from the Deep South, Johnson became a world traveler who absorbed the customs and cultures of New York, Europe, and North Africa. He completed hundreds of oils, watercolors, gouaches, pen-and-ink sketches, block prints, silk screens, and ceramics. Johnson's career also spanned a gamut of styles from the academic, through the Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, and German Expressionism, to, finally, a "conscious naiveté".

Harnessed to plows or wagons, mules become emblems of agricultural life. The mule in //Sowing//, though based on an earlier, more naturalistic study, assumes the abstracted and distorted forms of its keepers and the surrounding environment. And just as the large hands and feet of Johnson's black farmers in //Sowing// suggests a life of hard work, so are the mules' knobby knees, broad hooves, and blinders emblems of a harsh existence entirely consumed with bearing burdens and pulling weights.


 * Suggested Questions: **
 * What are the forms (items) in this painting?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">How did Johnson arrange these forms?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Are the forms in this painting realistic?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">How can you tell what they are?
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Compare and contrast color hue and intensity with The White Ballet.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Key Concepts: **
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Design/Composition- Balance (divide vertically)
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Technique
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Color

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Artist Biography <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">SAAM Collections Page
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%; line-height: 1.5;">Links: **