The years from 1953 to 1978 exemplify the most important quarter century in Raymond Jonson’s career, when due to declining sight, he quit painting. During this period he left behind the transcendental aesthetics that he had helped develop in the 1930s and 1940s (put abruptly to an end by World War II) and left his post as professor of painting at the University of New Mexico at the end of the 1953 academic year. Both instances allowed the artist to take full stock of his achievements and passions over the past forty years and look ahead towards fulfilling these without distraction.
In the 1940s and 1950s European modernism was effectively stalled by the war, and Jonson began to look more closely at contemporary American painting, especially abstract expressionism, adopting a more spontaneous approach in his work using brayers, rags, and sticks and other means to achieve unpredictable results. These works allowed Jonson, who had until then been dealing in metaphors and symbols, to loosen his control of the results and let his paintings develop instinctively.
Upon this foundation, Jonson proceeded over the next two decades to gradually elaborate on the gesture and its meaning. But rather than becoming more complex and physical, his gestures evolved in the opposite direction, towards what the artist’s biographer Ed Garman called the “single gesture,” the kind of mark made in response to a single impulse, a feeling of “cosmic rightness” rather than a powerful, personal emotion.
This unity of purpose was enhanced with the introduction of polymer paints in 1957, allowing Jonson to advance far more quickly. The “perfect medium” in Jonson’s mind, polymers were durable, permanent, and, most importantly, dried quickly, allowing him to work faster and see his results almost immediately. In 1962, with the medium perfected to his satisfaction, Jonson abandoned all other mediums for polymer, which, in conjunction with his nearly exclusive use of Masonite instead of canvas, further cleared his studio and his mind of unnecessary clutter.
His designs and colors became more economical, with the subjugation of variety, supplanted with broad shapes defined by crisp edges and a single color predominating as the translucent overlapping forms, a staple of his 1930’s and 40’s work, for the most part disappeared. Space surrounds and impregnates these shapes, neither behind nor in front, but pervasive, luminous, and infinite—the fourth dimension of Cubism and modern physics taken to an entirely new level. The lucid clarity of these final paintings are the culmination of Jonson’s nearly 70 year journey into the furthest reaches of the imagination and, in this writer’s mind, are his most accomplished achievements.
About the Artist
Though Jonson moved to Chicago with the intention to pursue art commercially, he soon renounced commercial endeavors and devoted himself fully to the spiritual and philosophical possibilities of artistic expression. When the 1913 Armory Show came to Chicago, Jonson was fascinated with the new trends and ideas in modern art that he saw exhibited there. His interest in modernism was further heightened by his discovery of Kandinsky’s The Art of Spiritual Harmony in 1921.
After leaving the Art Institute, Jonson worked for several years at the Chicago Little Theater as a set and lighting designer. He spent two summers, in 1919 and 1920, at the MacDowell Art colony. In 1922, he paid his first extended visit to Santa Fe where, like so many of his modernist colleagues, he was profoundly influenced by the shapes and colors of the Southwestern desert landscape. He settled in Santa Fe permanently in 1924. Throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, Jonson exhibited regularly in New York and Chicago. In 1934, he began teaching at the University of New Mexico, where he remained until 1954.
Throughout his life, Jonson was a powerful force for the development of modernism in the Southwest. According to Ed Garman, Jonson was never simply interested in his own work, but was always devoted to the development and preservation of art as a benefit to the entire community of his friends, colleagues, and students. At the University, he taught and influenced such prominent artists as Richard Diebenkorn and Agnes Martin.
In 1938, along with Emil Bisttram, he co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists whose shared vision was to transcend material reality and advance the expression of spirituality in art through the creation of non-representational work. The Group included Agnes Pelton, Lauren Harris, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Stuart Walker, and Horace Towner Pierce. Jonson was also constantly devoted to exhibiting modern work and sharing it with the community. From 1927-1931, Jonson oversaw the creation of a “Modern Wing” at the Museum of New Mexico. In 1950, he founded the Jonson Gallery at UNM – the only space in the southwest where abstract and non-representational work was being exhibited at that time. There, Jonson was able to support the careers of many young modern artists by providing them with a space for the first exhibitions.
Though Jonson did not begin his career as an abstract artist, he was always fascinated as much by the expressive possibilities of painting as by the representation of material reality. The majority of Jonson’s work throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s is influenced in some way by notions of composition, and combinations of colors than with the physical world. These works are a kind of ‘exaltation of landscapes’ (Garman 1976; 66) in which the natural world is infused with order and rhythmic unity.
In the late 1920s, Jonson began to turn entirely to abstraction. After this point, Jonson’s goal was to create ‘pure abstractions’, in which his final paintings retain ‘no items of detail or fact taken from the physical components of the ‘inspiration” of the work (Ibid; 76). In this way, he could be free of the constraints of subject matter and focus purely on the expressive possibilities of composition and color. To Jonson, the ultimate goal of painting, which he pursued throughout his career with rigorous, single-minded devotion, was to portray the sacred rather than the earthly. ‘Jonson did not believe the sacred to be ‘beyond all reach’ nor did he believe it to be ‘the hopeless quest.’ He believed that art is precisely the vehicle by which is expressed the otherwise inexpressible’ (Ibid; 106).
In 1938, Jonson’s work was profoundly impacted by his adoption of the airbrush. With the airbrush, Jonson found that he could create uniformity of surface, transparency of shapes, and smooth and subtle variations of color that had never been possible before. With the widespread availability of acrylic polymer paints in 1957, Jonson was able to free himself almost completely from technical considerations and devote himself whole-heartedly to the configurations of colors and shapes for which his later work is best known.
Jonson exhibited throughout his career in Chicago, New York, and New Mexico. His work is included in the public collections of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of New Mexico.
Download Full Biography