George Johnson : world view

Melbourne : Macmillan Art Publishing, 2006. Quarto, boards in dustjacket, pp. 256, illustrated. Fine copy, as new.

George Johnson arrived in Australia from New Zealand in 1952 and in 1956 held his first exhibition of abstract painting in Melbourne. This book marks the artist’s 80th birthday and fifty years of singular dedication to philosophy-based abstract imagery. Johnson’s work is uniquely consistent – rarely straying from compositions based on primary shapes and a limited range of colour preferences, but demonstrating how these minimal means can, in combination, serve as surrogates for complex ideas. Additional contributors to the next include the artist’s brother, renowned New Zealand poet, Louis Johnson; Australian poet and critic, Gary Catalano and Melbourne philosopher, Patrick Hutchings.

Contents
In the mind : a note on George Johnson and his paintings / Gary Catalano Modus operandi / Christopher Heathcote George Johnson and geometric abstraction / Jenny Zimmer Geometric abstraction Geometric abstraction in Australia To be an abstract painter in Australia Painting in the 1950s and 60s Avenues to geometric abstraction Mature abstraction George Johnson : beyond animism and beyond animation / Charles Nodrum Into abstraction : paintings and drawings of the 1950s and 1960s Relationships : paintings and drawings of the late 1960s and early 1970s The brown paintings of the mid-1970s The late 1970s to early 1980s : structures and constructions The early to mid-1980s The triangle : a perfect symbol The late 1980s : blue, grey and increasingly minimal The late 1990s and early 2000s : a scatter of triangles A retrospective exhibition, 2002 George Johnson : an aesthetic of inevitability / Patrick Hutchings.