By Tessa Nolan
The exhibition Claudette Johnson: Presence opened at the Courtauld Gallery on 29 September 2023 and ran until 14 January 2024 in the Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries. It was the first monographic show of Johnson’s work to be held at a major public gallery in London, a fact that underscores how long the British art establishment took to acknowledge one of its most accomplished figurative artists.
Johnson was born in Manchester in 1959 and studied Fine Art at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, where she became a founder member of the BLK Art Group in 1980 alongside Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers, and Marlene Smith. The group staged its second exhibition at the Africa Centre in London in 1983 and played a central role in the emergence of Black British art as a recognised movement. Johnson also delivered a talk at the First National Black Art Convention in 1982, the only presentation by a woman artist, which provoked a heated exchange and catalysed the formation of a network of Black women artists across the country.
The Courtauld itself was founded in 1932 through the philanthropy of the silk manufacturer and collector Samuel Courtauld, the diplomat Lord Lee of Fareham, and the art historian Sir Robert Witt. It has been housed in the Strand block of Somerset House, designed by Sir William Chambers between 1775 and 1780, since 1989. The gallery closed in September 2018 for a three-year renovation project called Courtauld Connects, which introduced improved accessibility, refurbished historic interiors and expanded display spaces. It reopened on 19 November 2021, and in 2026 the Courtauld was ranked the world’s top institution for the study of History of Art according to the QS World University Rankings.
Presence was co-curated by Professor Dorothy Price, the Courtauld’s Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History, and Dr Barnaby Wright, Deputy Head of the Gallery and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th-century Art. The exhibition presented a carefully selected group of major works spanning Johnson’s career, from early drawings of the early 1980s to new and recent pieces. The accompanying catalogue, edited by Price and Wright and published by Paul Holberton Press, runs to 119 pages with 50 colour illustrations and includes original research drawn from conversations with the artist.
The first room held six works dating from the early 1980s, including I Came to Dance (1982) and And I Have My Own Business in This Skin (1982). In the latter, a portrait of a modern Black woman is superimposed over a pastiche of an early 20th-century “primitivist” nude, a direct challenge to the sexualised depictions of non-white bodies found in the work of painters such as Paul Gauguin, whose 1887 painting Nevermore hangs in the Courtauld’s permanent collection just outside the exhibition space. The Trilogy (1982–86), composed of three large portraits of women in black, blue and red, demonstrated Johnson’s early command of posture, gaze and scale as tools for asserting selfhood.
The second room covered work from the last eight years. Standing Figure with African Masks (2018) depicts the artist in a confrontational pose beside the kinds of masks and carvings that influenced Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Figure with Figurine (2019) shows Johnson in sweater and jeans beside a small nude statuette of an eroticised African woman, her sombre expression refusing the viewer’s gaze. Kind of Blue (2020), a large pastel and gouache drawing of a young man in a white hat and vest on a wooden bed, was widely singled out for praise; the Guardian described it as a “melancholy study” in which the subject “stares into space, pondering pain and loss.”
Johnson works primarily in pastel, gouache and watercolour, though recent pieces have explored oil, oil stick and egg tempera. She makes no preparatory sketches, or only minimally, allowing the composition to develop during the act of drawing. Her subjects are almost always people she knows, drawn from life, and she rarely names them. As she told Tate: “I wanted to tell a different story about our presence in this country.” The figures are typically large-scale, often life-sized, and positioned frontally to demand the viewer’s attention.
Critical reception was strong. The Evening Standard gave the show five stars, calling it “spellbinding.” The Guardian awarded four stars and described Johnson as “a pioneer of Black British Art.” Time Out and the Financial Times both gave four-star reviews, with the latter calling the exhibition “riveting.” The catalogue was longlisted for the 2024 Berger Prize, awarded by the Walpole Society for excellence in the writing of British art history.
Johnson was elected a Royal Academician in 2024 and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize that same year. Her work is held in the collections of Tate Britain, the Arts Council Collection, Manchester Art Gallery, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, among others. The Courtauld itself acquired Blues Dance (2023) with support from the Garcia Family Foundation. This exhibition represented not merely a retrospective of an underrecognised career, but a recalibration of whose presence the British art establishment chooses to acknowledge.
Sources:
- The Courtauld Institute of Art, Claudette Johnson: Presence exhibition page (courtauld.ac.uk)
- Wikipedia, “Claudette Johnson” and “Courtauld Institute of Art”
- Jonathan Jones, “Claudette Johnson: Presence review – subtle swipes at the exploitative modern masters,” The Guardian, 28 September 2023
- Caroline Douglas, “Claudette Johnson’s ‘Presence’ at Courtauld Gallery,” Contemporary Art Society, October 2023
- Ortuzar Projects, “Claudette Johnson: Drawn Out,” press release, March 2023
