A CHILDHOOD IN NEW YORK

I've always had a very broad view of things. My parents were both portrait painters of international renown, and so I started as a painter. Then I started to build things with my hands. The relationship between pure art and construction was thus my background. The talents I was given, the gratuitous opportunities and encouragements provided me, and the aura of parental love spun about me, how could I fail? Although I have endured my share of professional adversity, work for me was always an ethic and a joy.

My grandparents emigrated with my infant father from Copenhagen to Chicago in 1876. Grandfather was a carpenter and a maker of patterns, those exact wooden models from which metal castings were made. In need of a more reliable glue, he quietly devised from milk what today is known on the market as Latex. He invented also a domestic incinerator and the first pencil sharpener. The American Dream he had realized, yet for failure to patent these inventions, he was not rewarded with fortune.

His son, my father [John Christen Johansen 1876 - 1964], for reasons of poverty, left school at ninth grade to help make the family living. But with financing from a friend of the family, was enrolled to study painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. There he met an equally talented young woman student, later to be my mother. Married to each other and moved to New York City, their careers sustained them as world class portrait painters from the 1910s through 1940s. 

My mother [M. Jean MacLane Johansen 1878–1964] was commissioned to paint the portrait of Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians. Father's works later included portraits of three presidents: Hoover, Coolidge, and Roosevelt. They both painted presidents of numerous corporations and institutes and US cabinet members and were both elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1918, my father was awarded by the U.S. Department of State the prestigious commission to record on a large canvas, there in the Hall of Mirrors, the deliberations and the actual signing of the Versailles Treaty (right). He also made portraits of each of the signatories of the Allied Nations, now exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.                -  John M Johansen

As a slow reader, however, I was forced in preparatory school to accept discipline for my academic survival. With some feeling of vengeance, I met these academic and literary standards and later graduated cum laude from Harvard.

Up until this time, I was a painter, and would have been comfortable to be a younger member of a family of painters. In the long run, my comfort has been found not less in painting so much, but rather centrally in architecture, where the whim of a free artist must yield to the restrictions (and potentials) of structure and function. As the same boy who built tree houses, caves and bridges, I am rightfully an architect. Psychometric tests have borne this out. The fulfillment of my life has borne this out. Whether it were for me to be painter, composer, or architect, my parents would have said that I had it within me. "Choose your own field, give it your best, and find that the reward is in the doing."    -  John M Johansen

REWARD IN THE DOING

Certainly my motivations were always that of the play principle rather than that of the reality principle. Progressive education of the John Dewey variety taught me that discipline need not be developed for its own sake, but rather acquired in the process of impassioned pursuit of some creative goal.

EARLY INFLUENCES

Born in New York City in 1916 to parents who were both internationally renowned painters, John M Johansen’s early childhood was focused primarily on the development of his creativity. 

We shared a strong and devoted family life. By their mutual agreement my parents gave us no instruction in painting. Independent search and originality was expected of us, and the quiet, assuring, but never overbearing, presence of their personalities and creative powers is still within me.

Like so many future architects, my childhood make-believe life was enacted within spaces and enclosures. Tree houses with retractable ladders, caves and tunnels in earth, igloos of snow, packing box houses, bridges, walls, framed many of my young experiences. They are still vividly memorable to me and, in fact, variously incorporated into the building designs of my adult years. Is this the child as latent architect? Or the architect as eternal child?  

     - John M Johansen

A FAMILY OF ARTISTS