There is a crackly tape recording of Claudette Johnson addressing Britain’s first ever Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982. It is one of those stray recovered moments in the national conversation that passing time has made electric. Johnson was 22, and her voice on the recording is tentative but spirited as she goes through slides of the new paintings she has been making as a student at the city’s polytechnic – mostly big, bold canvases of Black women – and sets them beside more familiar images from the canon of western art: Paul Gauguin’s “exotic” South Sea islanders, say, or Édouard Manet’s Olympia, in which a Black servant almost disappears into the shadows beside the spotlit white nude in the foreground.
On the tape, Johnson’s small voice makes a determined case for the idea that what she was doing in her second-year fine art course in the Midlands had never been done before, at least in Britain. “Black women have been presented as people who did not have anything to offer in themselves but were just there to be looked at,” she says. “I have tried in my own images to be very personal, and to talk from my own experience and nothing else, so I can be sure it’s honest and explore a side of Black women that isn’t often seen.”
The moment that social history now recalls comes at the end of her session, after an invitation for questions from the floor. One member of the audience, with a certain mansplaining swagger in his deep voice, confronts Johnson’s argument.
“Earlier,” he says, “you showed a few pictures of works by European artists and then you showed some of your own… If I were looking at those with no explanation, I wouldn’t see any difference.”
Johnson sounds a bit thrown by this question: “Why is that?”
“Because,” the man goes on, “they were both just personal representations by the artist of a particular subject…”
“I think,” Johnson cuts in, quietly, “there is a vast difference in intent and in content. In western art, you might give the same attention to the corner of the canvas that has the sky in it as you would to the corner with the [Black] figures. In my work, that wouldn’t happen. The focus is always on the image of the Black woman…”
On the tape after this exchange, you can feel all the tension in the room between two rival ideas of what “Black art” – the term itself opened up a hundred questions – might, in 1982, properly concern itself with. On the one hand, there was the belief that Black British artists must produce work that directly spoke to “the struggle” against racism (the first wave of riots in Handsworth, up the road, were fresh in the collective memory), work with a “clear positive message” that had little to do with the “white galleries” of the establishment.
On the other side was Johnson’s contention that art properly expressed an individual vision, that it couldn’t only be sloganeering, and that though there was merit in presenting Black women as uniformly “positive and upbeat” in line with political doctrine, the truth was both more vulnerable and more powerful.
Before that argument was allowed to develop on the convention floor, however, there was a pointed call for a lunch break from another male voice on the stage. Johnson, symbolically it sounds now, was dispatched upstairs, to “the sixth floor”, with the rest of the female artists in the room, for a breakout session on some of the ideas discussed. That conversation – which included the future Turner prize winner Lubaina Himid, and Sonia Boyce, Britain’s representative at last year’s Venice Biennale – has, in the years since, never stopped.
One result – if you fast forward four long decades from that tape recording (years in which Johnson, having briefly been one of the brightest stars in the firmament of young British artists, had all but abandoned her vocation) – is that the argument that her art was different and important is finally getting its proper due. Next week, a full retrospective exhibition, Claudette Johnson: Presence, is the unmissable attraction at one of the most august of art institutions, the Courtauld Gallery in London. Johnson’s women will take centre stage among the Manets and Gauguins of the Courtauld’s permanent collection.
When I met her at her studio in a modern tower on the banks of the River Lea in east London a couple of weeks ago, she was making the last decisions about exactly how that show would come together; how her images might assert their gaze at one another and at the public. She is 63 now and has cycled from her home in Clapton, a couple of minutes away. Taking her bike up in the lift, she expresses some of the pinch-me excitement and energy that you might hear on that tape 40 years ago. “It’s a fantastic feeling,” she says. “The Courtauld certainly wasn’t a place I ever expected to show my work in.”
In her studio, I mention to her something I’d read – that between about 1990 and 2015 she didn’t really think of herself as an artist at all. Is that actually how it felt?
She smiles. “There was a long period where I would have thought it was aggrandising to describe myself in that way,” she says. “I was producing much less. I was working full-time in a project for homeless people. I’d given up my studio. Art moved very far into the background.”
For many years, she says, the first question she was asked socially was invariably about motherhood rather than painting: “How many do you have now?”
“I think people got tired of saying: ‘Are you working?’” she says. “I used to avoid going to private views because either that question would come up, or they wouldn’t even ask me and that was even worse. I just got into a place where it seemed too far away.”
She reverted in some respects to an idea that she had grown up with in Manchester – that art was not really a career that might be open to her. Johnson’s parents were part of the Windrush generation. Her mother was a finisher in a clothes factory. Her dad worked in the haulage industry; their interest in art did not extend much beyond his ability to draw lifelike horses from memory. “I only discovered quite late in his life,” she says, “that his understanding of that form came because he had looked after my grandfather’s horses when he was a boy in Jamaica.” Her parents had proudly come to their daughter’s solo exhibitions in Manchester and Rochdale after she graduated, but the “long lull” that followed was perhaps no surprise to them.
The turning point for Johnson was a phone call from Himid, who had perhaps done most to keep that original group of 1980s Black female students going. Himid had curated their seminal early shows, Five Black Women at Africa House in 1983 and The Thin Black Line, a group show at the ICA in London in 1985. Over subsequent years, Himid would contact Johnson to ask what she was up to, “though less and less as the years went by”.
In 2014, Himid had borrowed some of Johnson’s early canvases to photograph them. Organising their return, she simply said: “I’d like to see you making your marks again. What can I do to help get you going?” There was a plan for a show at the Hollybush Gardens Gallery in 2015. Himid, professor of contemporary art at Central Lancashire University, supported Johnson to get a studio space and arranged get-togethers with the other women – Ingrid Pollard and Helen Cammock – in the show. Johnson sensed the reignition of her youthful ambition.
“I discovered I still had the urge,” she says, smiling, “and things to say.” She made the upper half of a new image and sent it to Himid. “I was so uncertain about what it looked like to other people,” she says. “I needed that validation, the confidence to stay with it. It was quite nerve-racking.”
That show and others that followed coincided with the long overdue reappraisal of art collections in light of revisionist histories of empire and the Black Lives Matter movement. Witnessing that renewed affirmation of some of the Black British artists written off or written out of recent history must have been gratifying in some respects?
“Yes. Though I still feel a bit like a unicorn – that I may disappear again. I wonder how deep rooted it is. When I think back to that 1980s moment, particularly when we had the show at the ICA, I thought then: ‘We have stormed the citadel! We’re here now!’ And of course, that wasn’t the case at all.”
The reasons why that earlier movement of Black artists foundered is a subject for numerous cultural studies courses. A high point for what had become the BLK Art Group was a 1989 show at the Hayward Gallery called The Other Story that tried to tell a more inclusive history of British art. Critics, led by the pantomime provocateur Brian Sewell, were rudely unpersuaded. Tim Hilton, writing in the Guardian, was partly put off by the fact that “scarcely one black artist in Britain has had the benefits of an extended professional career: a dealer, regular exhibitions, interested critics, sales and the support of one’s peers”. Far from opening new doors, the show marked a moment that they slammed shut.
“I don’t think I was immediately aware of that,” Johnson says now. “But I think probably over the next five years, I thought: ‘Oh, there hasn’t been another show.’ For me, it coincided with my having two sons and having less time. I can remember thinking: ‘As soon as I’ve got the children to bed I’ll make some notes.’ I had a little book where I’d jot down ideas for drawings. But there would rarely ever be the moment where I could actually allocate that time.”
Her group of artists watched the front-page attention given to Damien Hirst and the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists (YBA) with a sense of “might have been”.
“We did wonder what it would have been like to have that kind of interest and exposure when we were emerging,” she says. “And it did feel a bit unfair.”
* * *
When she returned to the studio, she inevitably returned to her ideas of the figure, still betraying the struggle of conception in what she calls her “raggedy” line. Her conviction that she had something new to say hadn’t gone away. I wonder if she can identify the first moment that happened?
It was when she was at Wolverhampton, she says, and she started drawing from her imagination as well as from life. “I had all these received hypersexual images of Black women,” she says. “But I realised that in my imagination there were different figures almost waiting to come out. A very centred figure, a figure that had her own agency, as opposed to being at the mercy of these stereotypes. It was a bit like that moment when we shifted from talking about ourselves as ‘coloured people’ to talking about ourselves as Black people. The psychological shift that took place was exploding this idea that Black was dirty, evil or reprehensible, but rather this source of power. I started with that, and then found my own identity.”
She recalls being frightened by the strength of some of the images she made, as if she was channelling feelings she wasn’t fully conscious of. “There was one with a kind of Terminator-style head, where half the face is skeletal and the other part was fleshed out,” she recalls. “Or in my painting I Came to Dance the centre of the body appears to be almost absent and is only represented by a line.” She borrowed a phrase from the poet Gail Murray to describe something of what she was trying to express: “I have my own business in this skin and on this planet.” That text surrounded an image of a “crouching figure with teeth bared and fingers clawed”.
Her most recent work, often at scale, retains that power to unnerve in layers of pastel and gouache. In one corner of her studio is a self-portrait she has been working on, which she keeps covered up. “I really don’t like looking at it,” she says with a laugh. “If I think about it as me, it makes me very uncomfortable. If I think about it as a drawing, that’s fine.”
From the beginning of her practice she has collected images and photographs of strong and self-contained and joyful female figures as inspiration. Some are pinned to the wall above her desk. One shows her mother and grandmother engaged in an epic hug on a visit to Jamaica. Another a Congolese pende mask of the kind that inspired Pablo Picasso and which finds its way into some of Johnson’s painting Standing Figure With African Masks. Does she see her work as part of that lineage that goes far beyond Wolverhampton in 1982?
“My identity is a composite one,” she says. “I didn’t visit Jamaica until I was in my early 20s and go to any part of Africa until my early 50s. And yet I am a woman of African-Caribbean descent so my work is [partly] an attempt to position myself in relation to this history. It’s trying to tease out all these myths and fables that I grew up with. I remember reading Little Black Sambo but also, by contrast, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth [Fanon’s analysis of colonial psychology]. I have to unpick that idea of otherness as represented by Black people and see what it can offer to me in terms of imagery. But it’s also an ongoing quest to try and understand where I sit in relation to it all.”
I wonder if in the fallower part of her career she ever imagined she would be looking forward to the “late period” now in view? She smiles. “It feels luxurious to have an income from my work. It’s very freeing.”
One consequence is that she is about to move to a new, larger studio that will allow her to work at greater scale. She indicates a large “canvas” made of bark from Uganda that she has been preparing but does not have the space to work on. “I can’t stand back here more than 8ft and that doesn’t allow me to see the scale of that,” she says. The new studio – “a dream come true” – will allow that possibility.
Johnson might be about to enjoy a hard-won retrospective, but in some ways, you sense, she can’t wait to really get started.
Claudette Johnson: Presence is at the Courtauld, London, from 29 September to 14 January 2024
