Singing Saints 1940

Sargent Claude Johnson made this print, Singing Saints, and it’s all about the movement and rhythm of the figures, emerging from the paper through the magic of line. I like to imagine Johnson making this, carefully hatching those lines, building form with subtle gradations of tone. Think about the speakers, mouths open, eyes closed, lost in the moment. What song are they singing? Maybe something soulful, or a joyful spiritual? You can almost hear the music coming out of the paper. There’s something else going on too—those clean, simplified shapes, the way Johnson flattens space, reminds me of Cubism, of artists like Picasso and Braque. But Johnson brings something else to the party, a deep connection to African and African-American culture. It's like he's in conversation with all these different traditions, pulling them together into something new and powerful. It’s so cool when artists do that, taking what came before and making it their own.