BUFFIE JOHNSON

New York, 1912 — New York, 2006

Born in New York City, Buffie Johnson was one of the most intellectually restless painters of her generation — a figure whose practice moved fluidly across Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and mythologically charged realism over a career spanning seven decades. She studied at the Art Students League, earned an M.A. from UCLA, and trained in Paris at the Académie Julian and Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17, where she received studio visits from Francis Picabia. During a formative two-year stay in Paris (1937–39), she befriended Sonia Delaunay and encountered Brancusi, Braque, Giacometti, and Picasso before returning to New York at the outbreak of war.

In New York, Johnson became a quietly pivotal figure in the emerging avant-garde movement. Peggy Guggenheim included her in Exhibition by 31 Women (1943), to which she contributed Déjeuner sur Mer (1942), a surrealist seascape of two women clinging to a wreck. Incensed by a Time magazine critic who refused to review the show on the grounds that there had never been a first-rate woman artist, Johnson wrote an essay on women artists and the insurmountable hurdles they faced. The essay remained unpublished until 1997, when it appeared in the catalogue for a commemorative exhibition at the Pollock-Krasner House. From 1946 to 1950 she taught at the Parsons School of Design, and her work appeared at the Whitney Biennial on multiple occasions. By 1950, living on Long Island among Pollock, Krasner, de Kooning, and Motherwell, she was fully embedded in the New York School — though her practice consistently exceeded its terms.

Johnson's later work evolved into monumental botanical paintings and a numerological series, each phase animated by her decades-long engagement with Jungian thought and goddess iconography, culminating in her 1988 publication Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals. The Middle Way / The Great Mother Rules the Sky (Astor Mural) (1949–1959), a major work in The 31 Women Collection, was exhibited in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25) and 31 Mulheres at MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025). 

Her works are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2023, her work was included in Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and in Heroines of the Abstract Expressionist Era at the Southampton Arts Center — part of an accelerating scholarly reappraisal that now firmly positions Johnson as one of the central figures of the New York School.

Work by Buffie Johnson is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Johnson's contributions in the record of art history.