Renowned sculptor John Seward Johnson, Jr. dies at 89

John Seward Johnson, Jr., sculptor of hyper-realistic figures inhabiting cities around the world, creator of New Jersey’s Grounds For Sculpture and the Johnson Atelier, and grandson of Robert Wood Johnson, founder of Johnson & Johnson died yesterday, March, 11, 2020, surrounded by his family at his winter home in Key West, Florida. He was 89. The cause was cancer.

At the age of 38, Johnson had been a painter when his wife, Cecelia Joyce Johnson, noticed that he had a mechanical aptitude and encouraged him to try sculpture. He soon completed “Stainless Girl”, a nude in stainless steel, and never stopped. Less than a year later, Johnson won the top honor among seven-thousand entries at the Design in Steel Awards in 1969. From the beginning, he focused on creating realistic, life-sized bronze sculptures of people engaged in daily activities to “celebrate the familiar” and honor “the beauty of the rituals of everyday life.”

A New York Times art critic later wrote, “With their familiar subjects, attention to the tiniest details and realistically colored patinas, Mr. Johnson’ s bronzes are enormous ly popular… Pedestrians experience his images as they go about their daily activities, often responding with the surprise that accompanies any successful trompe l’oeil.” A viewer of one of Johnson’s sculptures told the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, ‘’It was as if with a single touch of the finger you could awaken the figure to life.’’

It was during the International Sculpture Center symposium in 1980 that Johnson first achieved wide acclaim for his then-largest and most dramatic work, The Awakening. This led to exhibitions at Four Seasons Hotel locations around the world, citywide exhibitions in Rome and Berlin, and world’s fairs and expos, as well as a growing number of collectors from Europe and Asia. His work evolved in the final two decades of his life, exploring famous, iconographic references in order to awaken connection to art in a broader audience. “Beyond the Frame,” a series that immersed viewers in life-sized tableaux of impressionistera subjects, was among The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington’s all-time draws and later exhibited along the Seine in Bougival near Paris.

As he became prolific, the New Jersey studio that Johnson converted to a school of sculpture in 1974 grew into a vibrant community of artists and foundry workers. He found himself, “in the center of a creative storm, so I began to hire aspiring sculptors. A former foundry owner told me I had started a school for sculptors without realizing it.” This became the Johnson Atelier – both a technical school and an open foundry that revolutionized control of the medium. Previously, the secrets of casting had been well guarded – a holdover from the ancient system. At the Atelier, artists learned how to cast and gained freedom over their work, attracting well-known sculptors, including George Segal, Beverly Pepper, Georgia O’Keefe, Michele Oka Doner and Marisol, and becoming among the world’s foremost foundries.

“Double Check”, Johnson’s 1982 bronze sculpture of a businessman peering into an open briefcase was created to honor the thousands of workers who streamed past it every day in Liberty Park, adjacent to the twin towers of the former World Trade Center in New York. When they were destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “Double Check” was the only Ground Zero piece to remain intact with minimal damage, despite being covered in debris, and was dubbed “The Survivor” in numerous media accounts and remains there today.

As The New York Times reported: “[the sculpture] became an icon as newspaper and magazine photos showed it covered in ash and, later, by flowers, notes and candles left there by mourners and rescue workers. While ‘Double Check’ evolved into a memorial to all who perished, it was also a fitting metaphor for the city: though the sculpture had been knocked loose from its moorings, it endured.” When Johnson visited the statue, he was overcome with grief and photographed all of the mementoes as they had been left on his sculpture, then reproduced them in bronze and welded them onto a new casting which was then installed on New Jersey’s Hudson River Waterfront Walkway which overlooks the former site of the World Trade Center.

To the criticism of “kitsch” sometimes lobbed by art critics, Johnson responded with an amused, irreverent smirk and glint of the eye, like a pop songwriter to a chamber music purist. A lover of all forms of art himself, Johnson nonetheless found mainstream art criticism elitist, narrow and dismissive of art viewers. ‘’Most people who like my work are timid about their own sense of art. I love to draw it out of them, because they have strong inner feelings. They’ve been intimidated by the art world.’’ Johnson’s connection to his audience was never abstract; he admired Steven King and Judy Blume. “He had a deep sense of connection and oneness with other people. His social consciousness was ‘that person right over there.’” his son John S. Johnson III observed.

Johnson’s work, like the artist himself, always found an audience. Following a familiar pattern, Johnson’s monumental “Embracing Peace” visited San Diego as a temporary exhibit, but, according to the Los Angeles Times, “won over so many local admirers that the Port Commission there has voted to bring back a permanent version.” By the 90’s, Johnson sales totaled more than a million dollars per year. Today, nearly 500 Seward Johnson works are on display worldwide.

Seward Johnson, the son of John Seward Johnson and Ruth Dill, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on April 16, 1930. His father, a director of Johnson & Johnson intermittently for nearly fifty years, was a son of one of the founders of the pharmaceutical giant, and, with his brother, Robert Wood Johnson II, the company’s longtime chairman, charted the international expansion of the business in the 1920s. Ruth Dill Johnson, a native of Devonshire, Bermuda, was the daughter of Colonel Thomas Melville Dill, who served as Bermuda’s attorney general and was a member of the colonial parliament. Her younger sister, Diana Dill, married the actor Kirk Douglas in 1943, with whom she had two sons, the actors Michael and Joel Douglas.

Seward grew up with his three sisters on the family’s New Jersey estate; in London; in a 100-room castle in rural England; in Paris; and in his mother’s native Bermuda. The family also spent several years living outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the Robert Wood Johnson family house at Ghost Ranch, where they lived adjacent to Georgia O’Keefe. Johnson, who had acute dyslexia, attended the Forman School in Litchfield, Connecticut, and the University of Maine at Orono. He served in the United States Navy from 1951 until 1955, during the Korean War.

Johnson’s late-bloomer success as an artist reminded him of how he’d felt after finally being properly diagnosed with dyslexia. “The shame I had felt about it went away and I learned in special schools how to get around it, how to organize my thoughts in order to read and write in a way that would make sense visually to me.” In 1955, he dutifully took a management job in the family company, but it was later made severely clear to him by relatives that his future was not there, and he would yet again have to undergo a period of painful searching to find his place.