Palmer Hayden and William H. Johnson: Folk Modernism

Palmer Hayden and William H. Johnson both trained inside rigorous European academic traditions, then deliberately chose a flatter, plainer folk style that critics at the time mistook for a lack of skill rather than a considered decision.

The two men never worked side by side, and their biographies only touch at a few points along the way. Johnson grew up in South Carolina and built an adult life in Denmark before the threat of war sent him home. Hayden grew up on the East Coast, found his way into painting through the U.S. Army, and reached Paris on prize money rather than family support. What lines them up is the shape of the career, not a shared circle of friends.

Each man left a demanding, representational training behind for something that looked, on the surface, undertrained. That was never really what happened, and the record is specific enough to say so.

Who was William H. Johnson before he left South Carolina?

Johnson was born March 18, 1901, in Florence, South Carolina, into a poor Black family. He left school early to help support the household, and he taught himself to draw largely by copying newspaper cartoons. At seventeen he moved to New York and enrolled at the National Academy of Design, one of the more conservative training grounds in American art at the time. He studied there under the painter Charles Hawthorne and won several of the school's academic prizes along the way, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

None of that reads like the résumé of a folk artist. It reads like training built for portraiture and careful realism, the kind a museum board recognizes on sight.

What happened to his style in Paris and Denmark?

Hawthorne funded the trip that got Johnson to Europe in 1926. Once in France, he absorbed modernist painting directly, loosening into an expressive style far from the tight realism the Academy had drilled into him. He kept moving after that. Travels through Corsica, Belgium, and Denmark brought him to Holcha Krake, a Danish textile artist he married in 1930, and the couple settled in the fishing village of Kerteminde, near Krake's own home ground, according to the museum's biographical record of Krake.

The years that followed pulled Johnson further from the Academy's example, not closer to it. Traveling widely through Scandinavia and North Africa with Krake, he developed an interest in primitivism and folk art that would define the rest of his career.

Why did he trade that polish for a folk style after 1938?

With war closing in on Europe, Johnson and Krake returned to the United States in 1938. What followed wasn't a slow drift. It was a full pivot. Johnson shifted hard toward African American religious and social subjects, rendered in a deliberately simplified, folk inflected technique that had shed almost everything from his Academy years.

Two Harlem paintings from around 1939 to 1940 show the new direction plainly. In Café, painted in oil on paperboard, flat color and bold silhouette carry a couple through a night out, and the museum's own notes point to how the composition mixes Harlem Renaissance era African art references with the fashionable edge of the zoot suit years. Street Life, Harlem, oil on plywood and measuring 45 5/8 by 38 5/8 inches, shows another couple dressed to the nines for an evening out, style working as a visible marker of pride the same way it did for real dancers filling the Savoy Ballroom. That second painting came to the Smithsonian as a gift from the Harmon Foundation.

Holcha died of cancer in January 1944, and the loss nearly ended Johnson's career along with his health. He kept painting anyway, turning toward religious subjects rooted in Black folk tradition, among them Mount Calvary, an oil on paperboard crucifixion scene from around 1944 that the Smithsonian now holds as a Harmon Foundation gift. His mental and physical health broke down not long after. He spent his last twenty-three years institutionalized at Central Islip State Hospital in New York, where he died in 1970. More than a thousand of his paintings, watercolors, and prints now sit in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection, one of the largest single-artist holdings the museum has for any African American painter.

How did the army put Palmer Hayden on the road to painting?

Hayden's route into art ran through the military, not an academy. He enlisted during World War I and, while stationed at West Point and in the Philippines, worked through a correspondence course in drawing before his discharge, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. There wasn't an equivalent of Johnson's years under Hawthorne here. Whatever formal training Hayden picked up came in pieces, on his own time, inside a segregated army.

It still got him somewhere real. In 1926 a marine watercolor won him the first Gold Medal in Fine Arts from the Harmon Foundation, along with four hundred dollars. That prize money bought his ticket to Paris.

What does Fétiche et Fleurs actually show?

Painted in 1932 or 1933, not long after Hayden returned to New York from several years in Paris, Fétiche et Fleurs is a still life built around a Fang reliquary head from Gabon, set alongside lilies and an ashtray. The Smithsonian describes it as one of the earliest works by an African American artist to use authentic African imagery this directly, rather than a generalized or invented "African" motif standing in for the real thing. The painting won Mrs. John D. Rockefeller's prize at the 1933 Harmon exhibition, and it remains part of the forty-work Palmer C. Hayden Collection at the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, the same collection that holds his John Henry series.

That pairing, African form treated as serious subject rather than decoration, lands at roughly the same hinge point as Johnson's turn toward Harlem. Both men were reaching for something closer to home than what their training had asked of them.

What is the Ballad of John Henry series?

Starting in 1944, Hayden spent the next decade on a set of twelve paintings following John Henry, the railroad worker and folk hero of the ballad that carries his name. He later described the project in his own words, calling John Henry's story a stand-in for what he saw as the larger passage of Black labor "from agricultural into industrial labor," in the Smithsonian's account of his career. The full set now belongs to the Museum of African American Art's Palmer C. Hayden Collection, and part of the series showed at Harlem's Countee Cullen Library in 1952, while Hayden was still finishing it.

It is a folk subject painted in a folk register on purpose, the same logic behind Johnson's Café and Mount Calvary. Neither man backed into simplicity by accident.

Was The Janitor Who Paints a caricature, or something else?

Here the story gets harder, and it should. Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints exists in two versions, and the first one is genuinely difficult to look at now. Painted around 1937, the original canvas gave its figures exaggerated lips, noses, and foreheads, features lifted straight from Jim Crow caricature. Hayden showed that version publicly at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939, and it split opinion right away. Plenty of viewers read it as Hayden recycling the very stereotypes used against Black Americans, dressed up as social commentary about them.

Hayden's own account was that the painting was "a sort of protest painting," built around his friend Cloyd Boykin, an artist who supported himself working as a building janitor. "I painted it because no one called Boykin the artist," Hayden said. "They called him the janitor." That intent doesn't erase what the first version looked like on canvas. Sometime after 1940, Hayden repainted the piece, altering the caricatured features while keeping the janitor as its central subject, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which now holds the reworked version.

There's no honest way to write around this. Hayden made a painting with a real protest underneath it, and he also made a painting whose original faces did real damage on their own terms. Both things are true at once. The later repainting reads less like an apology and more like Hayden trying to keep the protest while cutting the part that had curdled into caricature.

Why did critics call both painters naive, and were they right?

Mid-century critics reached for "naive" or "primitive" almost automatically whenever a Black painter set academic polish aside for something plainer. It was a lazy read, and it was wrong for both of these men specifically. Johnson spent years at the National Academy of Design before he ever simplified a figure. Hayden built a career good enough to win Harmon Foundation prizes and reach Paris before he painted Fétiche et Fleurs. Neither man arrived at flatness because he lacked the hand for realism.

What actually happened looks closer to what Aaron Douglas was doing at nearly the same moment with his own stylized silhouettes, or what Archibald Motley was doing painting Chicago nightlife instead of academic still life. A generation of Black painters trained inside a system built on European models, then chose, on purpose, to paint in a register that read as folk, direct, and unpretentious. The choice wasn't a retreat from skill. It was a redirection of it, toward subjects the academy had never once asked them to take seriously.

It took decades for museum scholarship to catch up with that reading. For much of the twentieth century, Johnson and Hayden showed in smaller venues and Black-focused institutions while white peers with comparable training got the survey shows. The Smithsonian's decision to build a holding of more than a thousand Johnson works, and the Museum of African American Art's decision to keep Hayden's John Henry cycle together as a single collection, both came well after the artists' own lifetimes. Neither man got to see the reassessment land.

What does folk modernism look like on a wall today?

Both painters eventually got recognition the "naive" label had denied them for decades. Johnson's holdings at the Smithsonian run past a thousand works. Hayden's John Henry series and Fétiche et Fleurs anchor a forty-piece collection in Los Angeles. The Harlem Renaissance's visual artists took decades longer than its writers to get the same institutional weight, and Hayden and Johnson are a real part of why that gap eventually closed.

If the John Henry series reads as a folk narrative told across twelve panels, it sits close to what Jacob Lawrence did with sixty panels of his own Migration Series a few years later. Same instinct: plain color, sequential storytelling, no interest in academic finish for its own sake. That same plainness carries into the dance and jam session scenes both painters kept returning to, and it's the tradition behind Noirci Studio's Harlem Renaissance music art collection, original work built on the same belief these two men acted on. A plainer style can carry more weight than a polished one, when the subject actually calls for it.

Sources

• Smithsonian American Art Museum: William H. Johnson. Biography, training, and Europe years.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum: Holcha Krake. Confirms the marriage and Kerteminde connection.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum: Café. Date, medium, and description of the Harlem scene.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum: Street Life, Harlem. Date, medium, dimensions, and provenance.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum: Mount Calvary. Date, medium, and religious subject matter.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum: Palmer Hayden. Army service, Harmon Foundation award, and career overview.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Janitor Who Paints. History of the original version and the post-1940 repainting.
• Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles: Palmer Hayden Collection. Date and holding for Fétiche et Fleurs and the John Henry series.

Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.