The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 14, 2025

Print of three abstracted people with medium-dark skin tones, open mouths, and faces, hands, and arms created with rounded organic shapes, their clothes angular shapes. The largest person wears a striped black and yellow-green shirt, holding a person with a rectangular white body, like a swaddled baby. To our front left, a child wears a pink dress. What appears to groceries in a paper bag sits to their left, against the light blue background.

Fright

1942–43

William Henry Johnson

(American, 1901–1970)
America
screenprint with hand coloring
Sheet: 43.1 x 35 cm (16 15/16 x 13 3/4 in.)
Dudley P. Allen Fund 2003.1
Location: Not on view

Description

A native of Florence, South Carolina, William Henry Johnson studied at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1921. In the mid-1920s, he moved to Europe, painting still lifes, landscapes, and portraits in an expressionistic mode. Returning to New York in 1939, Johnson joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) and taught at the Harlem Community Art Center, where he met well-known African American artists like Jacob Lawrence. Johnson's work changed dramatically. He began using African Americans as subjects, explaining that "I want to paint Negro people in their natural environment . . . I wish to study my people thoroughly." Johnson acknowledged the innate power and spirituality found in the art of common people and decided to exploit his own folk heritage, returning visually to the South of his childhood. Making few prints, Johnson portrayed scenes of everyday life in a style of simplified, geometric areas of intense, flat color. This rare impression of Fright joins the museum's growing collection of works by African-American artists.
  • William H. Johnson: An American Modern. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (October 3, 2012-January 27, 2013).
    The Cleveland Museum of Art (10/03/2012 - 01/27/2013); "William H. Johnson"
  • {{cite web|title=Fright|url=false|author=William Henry Johnson|year=1942–43|access-date=14 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2003.1