Born in the Borders in 1897 to a farming background, Johnstone, a powerful personality, mixed with other radical thinkers in the Edinburgh College of Art in the 1920s. Alongside the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Johnstone was pivotal within the conception of the “Scottish Renaissance”. This was a cultural movement spanning art and literature that looked to move away from the perceived stagnancy of the centralised British cultural self-view, advocating instead a modernisation - and independence - of Scottish political and cultural values.
Though Johnstone’s origins were immutably tied to the Scottish landscape, his burgeoning career soon took a decisively international direction. In 1925 he was awarded a Carnegie Travelling Scholarship which enabled him to study in Paris with André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, as well as the Atelier Colarossi. In 1926 he travelled further afield to Spain, Italy and North Africa, accompanied by Max Bernd-Cohen, an American lawyer-turned-artist who become a lifelong friend. His circle of acquaintances in Paris at that time included the artists Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, and the eminent collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1927, Johnstone married the American sculptor Flora MacDonald, spending subsequent years in America and Scotland. They settled in London in the 1930s, with intermittent teaching commitments enabling him to return to America sporadically for the next twenty years.
Indeed, it was teaching that became his major life’s work and he was no less innovative within this field than within his art practice. He held the position of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1945 and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In this capacity he is credited with evolving the ideologies of each school, bringing them more in line with Continental art and design principles akin to the Bauhaus and creating teaching opportunities for exciting young avant-garde artists including Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Alan Davie and Eduardo Paolozzi. His services to education within the arts earned him an O.B.E.
Sojourns teaching in America included positions as Fulbright Lecturer and Director of the Colorado Springs Fine Art Centre Summer School. He also lectured at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Taliesin, Wisconsin, in 1949 and 1950.
Johnstone’s friend and colleague, the artist and theorist Anton Ehrenzweig, identified three stylistic phases in Johnstone’s painting career. Firstly, a surrealist phase of the 1930s, a cubist phase of the 1940s and finally his calligraphic or tachist phase of the 1950s.
