R. Stanley Johnson was a noted art collector, particularly of prints and drawings, and the president of a North Michigan Avenue gallery, R.S. Johnson Fine Art.
“Stanley was a unicorn,” said Gloria Groom, the Art Institute of Chicago’s chair of European painting and sculpture. “In a city that has historically collected modern art, he continued to perfect an Old Master collection of prints, and works on paper in graphite, watercolor and pastel from Rembrandt to Picasso that could vie with any museum collection.”
Johnson, 94, died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia Sept. 26 at Ascension St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chicago, said his daughter, Geraldine Johnson. He was a longtime Lincoln Park resident.
Born Robert Stanley Johnson in Chicago, Johnson grew up in Glencoe and graduated from New Trier High School, where he played football. He began studying engineering at Cornell University before transferring to Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in archaeology in 1951. Johnson also took classes at Mexico City College and the National University in Lima, Peru. He developed fluency in Spanish, German and French, his family said, and could read Latin and ancient Greek.
While at Northwestern, Johnson headed to Latin America with a team that was mapping the Pan-American Highway. He survived a major earthquake in Ecuador and an encounter with an anaconda in Panama’s jungle, his daughter said.
After college, Johnson traveled to Switzerland and enrolled at the University of Geneva for two years of graduate work in art history. Expecting to be sent to Korea, he volunteered for the U.S. Army and was selected for training in military intelligence because of his fluency in languages.
In 1955, Johnson was deployed to Vienna, where he worked as a liaison officer and then for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to his family.
“At the time, Vienna was still divided between the American, British, French and Russian occupying forces, and my father said it was like living inside Graham Greene’s novel ‘The Third Man,’ which had been made into a famous film of the same name starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton,” Johnson’s daughter said.
Johnson eventually left his military commission and resumed studying art history at the University of Vienna and then at the University of Innsbruck. On the steps of the University of Innsbruck, he met his future wife, Ursula Gustorf. The two eloped and moved to Paris, where they lived in a sixth-floor walk-up in the Latin Quarter with no hot water, his family said.
While in Paris, Johnson studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and he also studied for a term at the University of Perugia in Italy. In Paris, he frequently visited the studios of artists such as Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and he also became acquainted with intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, his family said.
In 1955, Johnson’s father founded a Chicago gallery, Johnson International Galleries. When he died in 1968, Johnson returned to Chicago to take over the gallery, which he soon renamed it R.S. Johnson Fine Art.
Under Johnson’s leadership, the gallery regularly organized exhibitions of Modernist artists, his family said. Johnson’s gallery became one of a small number in the U.S. representing Picasso, and while at the gallery he organized shows featuring famed artists, including Rembrandt, Durer, Goya, Degas, Cassatt, Leger and Picasso.
After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson’s gallery shifted to an online and private consulting format, but he remained active with the gallery.
“My father never retired,” said his son, Gregoire Klees-Johnson. “He continued to live the life of a modern-day Renaissance man right to the end.”
Dating to their time as financially struggling students in Paris, Johnson and his wife began acquiring artworks by artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Degas, Cassatt, Manet and Pissarro, along with museum-quality prints by Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Durer, Mantegna and Goya.
Ultimately, Johnson and his wife assembled a large collection of Old Master prints and 19th- and 20th-century French art. They showed their French art in major exhibitions, including in 2017 and 2018 at Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum and at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
“Stanley was a rare breed — a dealer whose passion was collecting, at heart a scholar of the Old Masters and of French art,” said Jonathan Rendell, Christie’s auction house deputy chairman. “Together with Ursula, Stanley viewed every relevant sale, bid enthusiastically when they wanted something and lived happily with their collection. In recent years, the collection has been shown to a wider public both in England and America — a tribute to the beauty of the works but also to the eyes of these extraordinary collectors.”
Johnson and his wife’s collection of Cubist works by French artists was exhibited in 1991 in three major U.S. museums in Washington, D.C., Dallas and Minneapolis, and in 1989 he wrote a book about Cubism. The couple regularly loaned their works to major art museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Louvre in Paris, the Tate in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Johnson’s daughter said her parents collected important works in oil and bronze, but their greatest passion as collectors was to collect prints and drawings.
“They felt (paper) captured artists’ thoughts more freely than was often possible in other media,” Geraldine Johnson said.
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Johnson wrote scholarly articles for academic journals about printmakers such as Mantegna and Jacques Villon and served on the board of Chicago’s Alliance Francaise. Johnson also was a longtime member of the Arts Club of Chicago, and he and his wife were frequent diners at the Lincoln Park restaurant Mon Ami Gabi.
“Stanley’s passion ran deeply throughout his life,” said Nicole Donnelley Herweck, a longtime friend. “He loved travel and found the passion in people he met along the way. Ask any server at the restaurants he so often frequented in Chicago. They all loved him because he cared about their life stories. He genuinely wanted to know all about them. It was the same with his neighbors, condominium employees, store owners, barbers and on and on.”
In 1983, the French minister of culture named Johnson an Officier des Arts et des Lettres for his contributions to French art and culture through his gallery’s exhibitions, his scholarly publications and his role at Chicago’s Alliance Francaise.
In addition to his daughter and son, Johnson is survived by his wife of 63 years, Ursula; and five grandchildren.
A family funeral service was held. Johnson’s family plans to hold a more public celebration of his life in the coming months.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
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