Buffie Johnson has had the great fortune of several distinct artistic trajectories, as a realist, abstract and a symbolic painter. In the late 30's, she traveled to Paris, studied with Francis Picabia, and returned to exhibit in Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century in 1943, in the first commercial show devoted to the work of 31 women artists.

In her early work she created a surrealistic, painterly world displaying her highly finished, almost photographic detail. She continued to return often to Paris, also to Morocco with Paul and Jane Bowles, and later, with Sonia Delaunay, in Greece. In the post-war period she moved into an extremely energetic organic abstract mode, and showed in the Betty Parsons Gallery with some of the most Pre-eminent painters of her generation. In the space of a decade she created a successful and distinctive oeuvre. This period culminated in the large murals, 110 feet high and 45 feet long, at 9,000 sq ft, which she executed for the new Astor Theater in Times Square in 1959.

Then began many years of working representationally with images of flowers and plants, after which she began a series of works called Numberings. These paintings constitute a distillation of her work that is almost transcendent in its spareness, yet the links to the earlier works emerge quite readily.

One's viewing of Buffie Johnson's work as a whole may further be enhanced by critic Parker Tyler's comparison of the gigantic, continuous, abstract images of her murals to the caves at Lascaux and Altamira. There is a consistent thread of development of the forms she employs through both the plant-based images and the most recent work. One's suspicion that the imagery is not merely 'abstract' is confirmed by her assertions that hers "was a very different concept than that held by men in the 1950's. I always had as an image an altarpiece to the Goddess.

Although my paintings have changed considerably over the years, the intention has remained true throughout." In 1988 she published Lady of the Beasts, book on the representations of the Great Goddess she had been working on for so many years. A partial listing of the 30 plus Museum and Corporate Collections that Buffie Johnson is in is: The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Guggenheim Museum of Art; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA; Walker Art Center; Whitney Museum of American Art; The National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian, etc.

Anita Shapolsky