Frank Tenney Johnson: Day for Night
Few paintings of the American West are as instantly iconic as Frank Tenney Johnson’s Western nights.
Day for Night. It’s the title of a famous François Truffaut comedy about the foibles and perils of filmmaking, and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1973. (Truffaut, if you recall, is the French scientist in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The title, Day for Night, refers to the techniques that filmmakers have used to represent night while actually shooting in daylight. If you’ve ever tried to take a picture at night, you will understand that it was, and remains, a central challenge in film, making sure the audience sees what you want them to see, without either revealing too much or obscuring the narrative beyond recognition. In the early silent film days, an editor would tint the film blue (night isn’t blue, of course, but we see it that way). Later filmmakers underexposed the film slightly, stopping the lens down two f-stops, or used a neutral density filter that placed a sort of adjustable diffraction grating in front of the lens, lowering the intensity of light without altering color values. They also played with lighting, flooding the foreground and letting shadows dominate as the mise-en-scene receded.
Whenever I look at Frank Tenney Johnson’s nocturnes, I think of that term “day for night,” and note how his paintings make use of many of these techniques—tricks, if you will. While marveling at his achievement, I also think about Johnson’s involvement with early Hollywood, his stints as an actor in silent Westerns and his many clients and friends among the movie moguls.
Frank Tenney Johnson was born in Iowa in 1874. As a boy, he saw the last of the prairie schooners heading West on the Overland Trail. His mother passed away when he was young, and Frank’s father moved the family to Milwaukee. One day, Frank’s class visited the city’s Layton Gallery of Art, and the boy decided that he would try to make a life in art. Johnson studied in Milwaukee under two of the Panoramists, F. W. Heine and Richard Lorenz, whose enormous circular paintings of biblical scenes and famous battles are understudied harbingers of film. Lorenz—who is not sufficiently appreciated as a painter, in my book—had wandered and painted the West. His paintings and tales inspired Johnson and gave him his subject, the subject that would occupy him throughout his career.
Though his compass pointed West, Johnson— and his new wife, Vinnie—went to New York. There, Johnson continued to study and scored quick success in the burgeoning advertising industry. Success built on success. Johnson’s sketches of animals at the Bronx Zoo earned him an advertising contract with Winchester rifles. The editors of Field & Stream magazine noticed his Winchester ads and they offered to sponsor a trip to the West which he would repay with illustrations. Johnson’s art alone couldn’t support him in Colorado, so he became a cowboy to earn a living. Seeing some of the last “beef roundups” in American history proved invaluable to his art.
Eventually, he and Vinnie settled in Southern California in the very heart of the nascent movie business. Johnson painted murals in movie theaters, and, as I mentioned, sold paintings to the moguls, and starred in silent cowboy Westerns. In December 1939, Frank and Vinnie were visiting their friends, the Callahans. Frank greeted Mrs. Callahan with a kiss. What neither of them knew was that Mrs. Callahan was coming down with spinal meningitis. Within days, she had died. By year’s end, Frank Tenney Johnson had gone into the night he loved so well.
Just as it’s difficult to know what influence silent-era Hollywood had on Johnson, it’s equally difficult to discern the extent of the influence that early painters of night had on his painting practice. It’s likely that he had seen some of Remington’s last masterworks, the “night scenes,” at least as reproductions in Collier’s and Harper’s magazines. Artists like Charles Rollo Peters and Will Sparks labored to depict the Western night in the ranches and adobes, while Blakelock, Whistler and others layered the shadows that the moon cast on canvas. In his book Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-century America, Alexander Nemerov argues that the advent of electric light made darkness darker, and that this supplanting of nature by science suited itself to nostaglic and elegiac elements in American painting. But Johnson seemed to want to do more than convey night as a mood and mystery. If he uses night to suggest a contrast between the natural world and a newly electrified culture, he wants to do so by telling a story, just as a film does.
What Johnson knew of all this is uncertain, though nights riding herd on the range seem to have coalesced his thinking. In a letter to Vinnie from a cow camp in 1904, Johnson wrote: “On one evening in the cool mountain air as we rode I watched the daylight fade and the moon come up to glow brighter until we cast strong shadows, and I had another fine opportunity to study the different colors change under the moonlight.” Johnson’s watching the herd, but in his mind he’s painting. What may also be true is that the nocturne was a way to set himself off and apart, both from past masters like Remington and from overlapping contemporaries like Russell and Leigh (who also did some superb, though entirely different night scenes).
The Sheriff’s Posse and The Stampede, for example, are traditional Western subjects, scenes of speed, violence and split-second decision making. There’s a wildness in the sheriff’s determination, in his spurring and in his horse’s response, where the horse’s head is like a premonition of the screaming horse in Picasso’s Guernica: raised up openmouthed, champing, the world in which he serves beyond his control. In diametric contrast, The Stampede is fascinating because it reverses day for night. Here, the turbulent thunderstorm turns day into night. Johnson makes the blue-green that works to suggest night do double duty as the kind of sky that drops twisters like toy tops. Every horn and hoof is a weapon in this race against time. In what is perhaps a nod to another great, the
skull near Johnson’s name at lower left echoes the skull that accompanied Charles Russell’s signature.
The lone cowboy and packhorse moving through the moonlit rocks is another Frank Tenney Johnson trademark. Painted on the Rim Rock Ranch in Wapiti, Wyoming, in 1934, when the artist had achieved his mature style, Beneath the Western Moon exemplifies Johnson’s deft combination of realism and impressionism. Knowing just when to heighten details and when to leave well enough alone makes for a work that moves the eye from cloud to man, man to horse, rocks to sage. Is it any wonder that so many of Johnson’s nocturnes feature white horses when Johnson’s technique allows moonlight and shadows to sculpt the beast in high relief without losing the feeling that all this is taking place in darkness?
If Frank Tenney Johnson wants to find the light in darkness, he also seems to want to find sound in silence. In silent films, intertitles did the work of dialogue, but a musical score—often performed live—accented the action. In Johnson’s nocturnes, the figures almost always seem silent—nature and other sounds do the talking: rocks
crumble under hooves; cattle low in the dark; echoes—friend or foe?—roll down canyons; guns blaze; fires crackle.
You can even hear music in a painting like Mexican Ponies, perhaps one of the Johnson’s most modern works. Dark, jagged, abstract shapes—think Franz Kline—take shape as you take the work in. The more you look at the painting, the more you see. As many as five figures all but melt into the darkness near a door that is nothing more than a small rhombus of orange yellow light at upper left. I see and hear this as a cantina door, and I hear a guitar as the only thing breaking the insect quiet of the moment as well as its underlying yet unspecified tension. The ponies are the ostensible subject of the painting, but the object of the gathering is speculative and elusive. The mysteries of night on the border and night as a border merge and become one. Which begs a question: is Frank Tenney Johnson’s Mexican night—and, by extension, his Native American night—more exotic and foreign to his own experience and therefore more in shadow than his cowboy night on the range? Food for another essay.
None of this should imply that Johnson didn’t paint any daylight masterworks. Measuring 45 by 45 inches—form following subject or subject suggesting form—frank Tenney Johnson’s 1937 masterwork, Smoke of a Forty-five, is a cinematic classic in broad daylight, canvas kin to a head-on, headlong action shot straight out of Stagecoach or The Searchers. Is the rider a lawman after a renegade, a robber, a rustler? Is he himself an outlaw out to settle a score? Is he a cowboy trying to turn the herd from danger? Is this the denouement of a long, True Grit chase? You write it. You film it in your mind.
The recent blockbuster exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, Once Upon a Time… The Western neatly articulates the influence of American Western painting and sculpture on Hollywood. There is, perhaps, a need for a corollary investigation into the influence of Western film on 20th century Western painting. You’d start where Nemerov leaves off, with Remington. You’d consider Russell, focus for a bit on Leigh, and find that Frank Tenney Johnson would be the linchpin in this study. You’d start with the blues in his silent film nights, and unravel the cinematography inherent in his technique. You’d see him revealing and concealing with a magic akin to the magic of film, pigment on canvas substituting for the silver of the screen. Day for night. James Balestrieri is director of J. N. Bartfield Galleries in New York City. Jim has written plays, verse, prose and screenplays. He has degrees from Columbia and Marquette universities, attended the American Film Institute and has an MFA in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon. He has an excellent wife and three enthusiastic children.