Folk Family
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A family of four stands facing the viewer against a blue-gray wall with dark vertical stripes — wallpaper or a curtain. The mother at the left wears a white dress patterned with small red hearts and holds a small girl in a yellow dress on her lap. The father at the right wears a white shirt, green vest, and dark blue trousers cut off below the knee, barefoot. A baby in a lavender outfit sits on his arm. The figures are painted in flat planes of color with no shading or modeling — bodies simplified to essential shapes, faces frontal, eyes looking directly out. Johnson developed this deliberately flat, folk-inflected style after returning from Europe in 1938, drawing on African American visual traditions, Scandinavian folk art (his wife Holcha was a Danish textile artist), and his own formal training at the National Academy of Design. Oil on paperboard.