Raymond Jonson and the Spiritual in Modernist and Abstract Painting

Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351778022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: American Art

This is the most thorough and detailed monograph on the artwork of Raymond Jonson. He is one of many artists of the first half of the twentieth-century who demonstrate the richness and diversity of an under-appreciated period in the history of American art. Visualizing the spiritual was one of the fundamental goals of early abstract painting in the years before and during World War I. Artists turned to alternative spirituality, the occult, and mysticism, believing that the pure use of line, shape, color, light and texture could convey spiritual insight. Jonson was steadfastly dedicated to this goal for most of his career and he always believed that modernist and abstract styles were the most effective and compelling means of achieving it.

1 “Art Is as Broad as Space”

Jonson’s Early Years in the West and Chicago

Raymond Jonson was born on July 18, 1891, in Chariton, Iowa, on the farm of his maternal grandparents. He was the eldest of six children of Gustav Johnson and Josephine Abrahamson Johnson, both Swedish immigrants. Jonson’s given name was Carl Raymond Johnson, but as a child he used his first name so infrequently that he gave up all references to “Carl” by his early twenties. In 1920 he decided to change his surname to “Jonson” so as to make it somewhat more distinctive than the very common “Johnson” while retaining some indication of his Swedish heritage through the rather unusual spelling and pronunciation “JOAN-son.”¹ Gustav Johnson was a Baptist minister whose service as an itinerant preacher led his family to move frequently across the Western United States, so the Johnsons lived in Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming before settling permanently in Portland, Oregon, in 1902. Jonson attended Montavilla Grammar School and Lincoln High School in Portland, graduating from the latter in 1909. As a teenager, he earned money delivering three local newspapers: The Oregonian, The Journal, and The Telegram.

Jonson’s childhood was rural, Western, migratory, financially impoverished, staunchly Protestant, and devoutly Baptist. None of this would have suggested that he would become a modernist painter and theater designer and an advocate of modernism. Yet his interest in art was sparked somehow when he was a child and intensified when he was a teenager. As a child he was fascinated with illustrations and cartoons in newspapers and magazines. He was similarly intrigued by a landscape painting in the style of the Hudson River School that his family owned and displayed in their living room. His jobs selling newspapers led to a brief stint doing illustrations for one of them. He became the first student to enroll in the newly established school at the Portland Art Museum in 1909, where he studied for a year. In spite of their apparent distance from art and culture, the Johnson family managed to nurture an interest in the arts for a number of their children. In addition to Raymond’s career in painting and theater design, his brother Arthur was a novelist, poet, singer, and musician, and their sister Ruth was an art critic in California for local newspapers.

Jonson was staunchly devoted to creating modernist, abstract painting that visualized and communicated the spiritual. This was the fundamental, unwavering purpose of his art for most of his career of nearly seventy years. In this, he was close to much Symbolist and early abstract painting, including the works and theories of Wassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Kasimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. Since his father was a Baptist minister and he was raised in a very devout household, the strong impact that Christianity, particularly the Baptist faith, had on Jonson’s attitude toward life and art is hardly surprising. Arthur explained this well when he wrote that:

Indeed, without stretching the meaning of words too much, one could say his whole life has been a religious activity.

The foundation is the hard rock of the Baptist faith of our parents. If you know anything about Baptist doctrines you know that to them religion comes as an individual, personal “experience.” Many are called but few are chosen. Raymond was both called and chosen … the whole mystical background of religion is part of Raymond’s background. The “experience” is something he has known. It has affected his work.²

Jonson considered himself a conduit for the spiritual to take physical, visual form that could be apprehended and experienced emotionally and psychologically through his paintings, just as he felt that the Divine was present in human beings and not only in some remote entity and that church and scripture were not necessary or perhaps not even as effective and compelling. As he said in 1938:

Man is wonderfully made and that God is in us and not some superior being outside of us. I believe that through the abstract and non-objective we will be able to state at least a portion of what life means. Through the comprehension of it we may reach a higher state of being. I … prefer the rhythms that flow into and through matter picking up essences and spiritual feelings.³

Jonson claimed to have had five religious, virtually mystical experiences in his life, in 1902, 1911, 1922, 1929, and 1938, all at critical times in his artistic development. The first two seem to have been particularly visionary, the next three less so. The first occurred in 1902, when Jonson was a child living in Portland. This experience was overtly religious and permanently directed his life toward a profound, all-consuming concern for the spiritual aspects of life. He once explained this experience as follows:

Portland, Oregon, 1902:

Without any warning while alone one day in our home when I was about 11 years old I had the feeling that God in person appeared to me and informed me I was ready to be converted to Jesus and join the church. I was convinced and experienced what I suppose was an hour or so of religious ecstasy. When the family returned I tried to explain what had happened but they considered me too young to know these things. But I insisted I knew and there was only one thing to do and do immediately—baptize me into the church. I succeeded in this. But the church failed me. Some 8 or 9 years later I realized the particular church [the Baptist faith in which he was raised] was narrow minded, bigoted and hypocritical to such an extent I turned against it in disgust. Realize I now am saying I turned against that church, not my original experience.⁴

The second experience led him to devote his life to art. It occurred around the time he became disenchanted with the Baptist church and all organized Christian worship. As he explained it:

Chicago, 1911:

Sometime in 1911 after I left home and set out for further art training I had another spiritual experience—this time pertaining to art. As a result I came to the conclusion that my life was to be dedicated to art. How this was to be accomplished I had not the slightest idea, but I knew it had to be and that all would in time work out. During the next few years a radical change in my whole life took place and I came through it a different individual. From that time on it has been a constant aim to develop and create independently and honestly.⁵

This experience led him to abandon the Baptist church and all formally organized religion, but not his belief in the power and presence of the Divine. He clearly differentiated between the formally organized church that had disappointed him and his continuous belief in a supreme deity and the possibility of experiencing and communicating with that deity, of discovering the deity within one’s self. The “radical change” he referred to is probably his formal art training, his exposure to modernism, and his involvement with simple stage theater design. Although Jonson said little about his religious beliefs, he probably would not have considered himself Christian, and certainly not a member of any Christian denomination, for most of his adult life. He asserted that his spirituality was different from many other modern artists in that he did not practice or follow Theosophy or any other modern spiritualism and mysticism, nor Christianity or any other long-established religious beliefs. He once said: “That is one reason why I have no religion—no theory of philosophy—no social status—no political membership and no esoteric convictions. To paint is enough for if that painting is great enough it must surmount all these.”⁶

In 1910 Jonson moved to Chicago to pursue more rigorous study for a career as a commercial artist at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In his first few years in Chicago, he studied there and at the Art Institute of Chicago. However, he soon discovered that a life devoted to art for commercial gain was not for him and that he was going to be a painter who worked in the newly unfolding modernist styles. As he declared in a letter written to his mother a few months after settling in Chicago: “Tell Papa his boy, if he ever amounts to anything, will not be a cartoonist but an artist. Cartooning is my weakest point and I see nothing in it. Ah! Art! real [sic] art for me. I pray for help and am reading solid books.”⁷ He continued the formal training that he started at the Chicago Academy in order to develop his technical skills. During those two years, he received thorough training in composition, color theory, anatomy, drawing from the nude model, oil painting, and commercial design and illustration. His instructors included Henry Frederick Wentz, Wellington J. Reynolds, and Bror J. O. Nordfeldt. He started going to exhibitions at various galleries and museums in Chicago to see both traditional and modern art. He viewed the Armory Show the day it opened in Chicago, and like many American artists of his generation, was amazed and intrigued by the works he saw. He knew that art was rapidly changing and that his work would change as well, but he took a long time to explore all that he was exposed to at the Armory Show. His comments to his mother reveal his enthusiasm and amazement in encountering so much modern art at one time:

Today the big International exhibit opened with a reception. Of course I was there. And such an exhibit. You must have heard about it—the Cubists, Futurists, Extremists, etc. Well, it’s some exhibit. Some of it’s good and some is rotten, if there is such a distinction. There are no rules in art, so the sanest way is to say that each man may so paint as to express himself or to express a sensation or experience. In other words, to show or express the way one feels things. Many of the things appear crudities beyond endurance but I won’t say what I think because I haven’t studied the stuff long enough. Believe me, there is some movement in art. Something surely is going to happen.⁸

This statement also indicates that he was becoming interested in the increasing possibilities of recording one’s observations of nature immediately and spontaneously and expressing one’s thoughts and feelings in more forceful and genuine ways, qualities that are basic to modern art. Jonson also read some of the most important studies of early modern art during his years in Chicago. In 1918 he read Théodore Duret’s Manet and the French Impressionists, Willard Huntington Wright’s Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning and Ogden Rood’s theories of color mixing and perception. In 1919 to 1920, he traveled to Boston and New York, which allowed even more firsthand contact with important modern artworks.

Bror Nordfeldt was the Chicago-based modernist painter who most influenced Jonson’s development during his years in Chicago. He worked in a Post-Impressionist style and was very familiar with the most recent developments in European art since he had traveled extensively and internationally. He was Jonson’s teacher at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and then his neighbor in the Jackson Park area on the south side of Chicago. Nordfeldt quickly went from being one of Jonson’s teachers to becoming his mentor and friend. Jonson responded to Nordfeldt’s teaching of traditional composition, drawing, and painting as well as his espousal of modernist art. His explanation of the importance of Nordfeldt’s teaching and encouragement indicates how he embraced modern art gradually but enthusiastically in his first few years in Chicago: “Nordie, as we call him, strikes me as the most prominent amongst us. He is [J. Blanding] Sloan’s and my strongest influence…. He has just had an exhibit at one of the best art galleries in the city and he put us all to thinking. He is called a ‘Post-Impressionist.’ We call it ‘Expressionism’ and it seems to be the core of art.”⁹ Years later, he elaborated in a letter on how influential Nordfeldt was for him:

We set up our studio [in the Jackson Park area] and associated with Nordfeldt as much as we could. He was, of course, busy painting. We saw a great deal of Nordy. He would drop in on us often.

One morning he came in. It was rather late in the morning. We were painting and we had a model. An old woman was posing for us. Nordy said, “I guess I’ll stay here awhile and see what you boys are doing. I’ll sit back here in the corner.”

He would say something like this: “The red you’re putting there doesn’t go with the yellow, it’s too light or it’s too dark. Now what do you think? Try it and see if you think it’s right.” So I would try it. Then he would say, “It looks all wrong to me. Try it the other way and then see what you think.” So the other would be tried.

There would be this type of discussion, back and forth, trial and error.

On another occasion he came by, probably the next day and he said, “I’m disappointed in what you are doing. Has anyone around here got some canvas, some brushes, some paint I could use and I’ll show you how it’s to be done.” So we fixed him up and he went to work and he painted the old lady very spontaneously and very quickly and went home. I still have the painting.

I’ve forgotten how long that went on but it went on for quite some time. You must remember that I was completely in sympathy with what Nordy said. Nordy knew what he was talking about in every respect.

His influence was a very strong thing. How good it was I don’t know. The stimulation and the experience were good. This very naturally would...