Claudette Johnson

This catalogue accompanies a major exhibition of work by British artist Claudette Johnson (b. 1959) at The Courtauld Gallery. A founding member of the Black British Arts Movement, Johnson is considered one of the most significant figurative artists of her generation. For over 40 years she has created large-scale drawings of Black women and men that are at once intimate and powerful. AUTHORS: Professor Dorothy Price FBA is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art, in London and has published widely in the areas of German modernism and Black and Diasporic art in Britain. She also works as a curator and has curated exhibitions for The Lowry, Salford; Arnolfini, Bristol and most recently Making Modernism for the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Dorothy is lead curator for the forthcoming exhibition Claudette Johnson: Presence at the Courtauld Gallery (opening September 2023) and the Royal Academy's ambitious exhibition Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change (opening February 2024). Until 2022 Price was editor of Art History journal where she worked with Prof. Sonia Boyce RA OBE on a joint special issue Rethinking British Art: Black Artists and Modernism, published in June 2021. She is currently working on several publications, including Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods (2024). Dr Barnaby Wright is Deputy Head of The Courtauld Gallery and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th-century art. He has curated and co-curated a series of exhibitions including: Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62 (2009- 10); Cezanne's Card Players (2010-11); Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 (2013); Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude (2014-15); Soutine's Portraits: Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys (2017-18); and Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen (2021). He has also curated exhibitions of contemporary art at The Courtauld including Richard Serra: Drawings for the Courtauld (2013); Jasper Johns: Regrets (2014); Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat (2015-16); and most recently Peter Doig (2022). 50 illustrations