Mitchell Johnson: Fifty Years of Painting

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Mitchell Johnson, Pigeon Point Green, 1992, 14x30 inches, oil/canvas (©Mitchell Johnson, 2026)

(SANTA CLARA, CA) - The Triton Museum of Art presents Mitchell Johnson: Fifty Years of Painting (January 16 - April 18, 2027). The third retrospective of the American colorist's career, following the Bakersfield Museum of Art (2014) and the Musée Villa les Camélias in Cap d'Ail, France (2023). The exhibition brings together 70 paintings made across six decades, from Johnson's teenage beginnings in the 1970s to canvases completed this year.

Half of the exhibition is devoted to figure paintings from the 1990s and 2000s, a body of work overshadowed by the popularity of Johnson's Truro and Presidio paintings. The exhibition also presents early California landscapes made between 1990 and 1999, important paintings of Paris and New York City, and four monumental canvases, each 78 x 120 inches, of San Francisco and Cape Porpoise, Maine.

Four vitrines of painted juvenilia from the 1970s open the story. Johnson made these early works as a child alongside his father and as a teenager at Staten Island Academy, where he first studied painting. They trace a lifelong conversation with color back to its source.

The exhibition marks a return to the Triton, which first exhibited Johnson's work in 1993 in the 9th Biennial Drawing/Print Show and again in a solo exhibition, Play and Work, in 2003.

A Voice Found Through Art History

Johnson has found his own voice through a deep study of the painters he admires, above all the School of Paris, Giorgio Morandi and Josef Albers. He does not borrow their styles. He connects with their intentions. In 2007 he was an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and his work is now in the collection of the Museo Morandi in Bologna.

The art historian Alexander Nemerov explored this lineage in his essay "Heir of Theirs: Mitchell Johnson and Fairfield Porter," written for Johnson's 2014 retrospective. "A pleasing thing about Mitchell Johnson's paintings is how they suggest other artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Giorgio Morandi, and Josef Albers," Nemerov writes. Yet "Johnson is neither creating a superficial pastiche nor waging an epic battle to win a style of his own." Instead, "Johnson knows these artists from the inside."

What the Critics Say

Johnson has drawn sustained attention from critics for the way his paintings join observation and abstraction. Writing in Whitehot Magazine, the critic Donald Kuspit has reviewed his work three times since 2023.

"Johnson is in a class by himself, for he seamlessly, ingeniously, eloquently re-integrates, with dialectical suavity, the purely artistic and objective, abstraction and realism, that Kandinsky divided, in rebellion against scientific materialism." — Donald Kuspit, Whitehot Magazine, 2023

"I don't know any work of Johnson in which the colors do not smile at you, that is, are bright with light." — Donald Kuspit, Whitehot Magazine, 2025

The art historian Peter Selz observed that Johnson's "realist paintings are basically abstract paintings and [his] abstract paintings are figurative," that is, representational. As early as 2004, ARTnews called him "a devoted colorist able to extract visual tension from the world around him."

The Exhibition

Fifty Years of Painting follows Johnson from his first painted objects as a child and teenager to the figure paintings, landscapes and cityscapes of his mature career. Color is the constant. His subjects change with the places he works: the topography of Truro on Cape Cod, where he has painted for more than twenty years; Paris and New York City; Cape Porpoise, Maine; Newfoundland; Italy; and San Francisco and the Presidio, close to his Bay Area studio.

Across the decades, recognizable scenes — beach chairs, fields, boats, houses, city streets — are built from flat, interlocking planes of color. The retrospective lets visitors see that approach take shape, from the experiments of a teenager to the work of a mature painter.

Events and Visitor Information


Exhibition	Mitchell Johnson: Fifty Years of Painting
Dates	January 16 – April 18, 2027
Public reception	Saturday, January 30, 2027, 12:00–2:00 pm
Artist talk	Saturday, February 20, 2027, 1:00–2:00 pm
Location	Triton Museum of Art, 1505 Warburton Avenue, Santa Clara, CA 95050
Hours	Tuesday–Sunday, 11:00 am – 4:30 pm; closed Mondays and holidays
Admission	Free
Website	tritonmuseum.org

About Mitchell Johnson

Mitchell Johnson (b. 1964) is an American painter known for his use of color. He began painting as a teenager at Staten Island Academy and studied painting, drawing and art history at the Washington Studio School and Randolph-Macon College before earning an MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1990, where he studied with Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Paul Resika, Larry Rivers and Robert De Niro Sr. Johnson moved to California in 1990, on the advice of Sol Lewitt, to work for in the Palo Alto studio of Sam Francis. Johnson was an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 2007, at Borgo Finocchieto in 2010 and a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome in 2015.

His paintings are in 40 museum collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Crocker Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Museo Morandi in Bologna. He has had retrospectives at the Bakersfield Museum of Art (2014) and the Musée Villa les Camélias in Cap d'Ail, France (2023). Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Mercier, Paris (2025 and 2026); and Twenty-One Years in Truro at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill (2026), where he also teaches an annual master color class. His paintings have appeared in the films The Holiday, It's Complicated and Crazy, Stupid, Love. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

High-resolution images and interviews are available on request. More at mitchelljohnson.com.

Media Contact

Aileen Tran, Communications Coordinator, Triton Museum of Art ·

communications@tritonmuseum.org

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