Mitchell Johnson: Personal Color (Selected Paintings 1988–2026)

Edward Hopper, “Paris Street,” 1906, 12x9 inches, oil on wood. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

By LUCA JOHNSON February 2, 2026

In his continued exploration of color, shape and scale, the American painter Mitchell Johnson will present a solo exhibition, Mitchell Johnson: Personal Color (Selected Paintings 1988–2026), at Galerie Mercier in Paris from February 28 to March 21, 2026. Galerie Mercier is located at 40 Rue de l’Université in the 7th arrondissement, a five-minute walk from painter Edward Hopper’s former residence at 48 Rue de Lille. Personal Color is shaped by decades of visits to Paris and Cape Cod, two places that have anchored and evolved Johnson’s painting over the course of his career.  

In 1989, at age 25, my father, Mitchell Johnson, made his first trip to Paris, crashing on the couch of a fellow artist in Montrouge, just beyond the 14th arrondissement. From there he would cross the Boulevard Périphérique at Porte d’Orléans and set off on long runs down Avenue du Général Leclerc, heading through the Rive Gauche toward the river. The Seine—its bridges, its vistas—felt distant, and reaching it became a daily pilgrimage.

A year later, he returned, this time staying in Champigny, even farther from the city, as long runs turned into RER train rides. These early visits were brief pass-throughs, chances to see a few museums before catching a train to Marseille and settling in the nearby village of Meyreuil to paint in solitude in the shadow of Mont Sainte-Victoire. The near-annual visits continued, and though Johnson absorbed the city, Paris would not appear in his work for decades.

In the fall of 1906, at age 24, Edward Hopper arrived in Paris from Manhattan just days after Cézanne’s death. Hopper stayed at a Baptist Mission at 48 Rue de Lille in the 7th arrondissement, mere steps from the Seine and a vista of the Tuileries and the Louvre. For Hopper, like so many young artists of the early 20th century, Paris was a rite of passage, the center of the art world. Yet for my father, going to France meant leaving Parsons, leaving New York—turning away from the East Coast art scene. It was not a calculated move; going to France, as he always put it, “was a hunch.”

Hopper began making his first Paris canvases in late 1906. Early works from this period—Bridge in Paris and Paris Street, both 1906—capture the gloom of early winter while still holding onto his New York palette and sense of space. Paris Street, in particular, shows a tightly packed row of buildings with reddish and dark-green storefronts that could just as easily belong to his former West Village neighborhood as to the 7th arrondissement. These canvases carry the sense of an artist not yet ready to let go of New York, projecting its rhythms and colors onto his new surroundings. 

Edward Hopper, “L'après-midi de printemps,” 1907, 23x28 inches, oil on canvas. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Spring brought a shift. Hopper’s works from 1907 show the impact of Parisian light and exposure to leading European painters. L'après-midi de printemps, captures the view around the corner from his home, looking across the Seine to Le Pavillon de Flore. His brushstrokes are looser, suggesting an early influence of the Impressionists. Two years later, Hopper executed Le Pont Royal, also depicting Le Pavillon but from the quai on the other side of the bridge. The difference of just two years is striking—the beige exterior of Le Pavillon is replaced by a reddish hue as if it were American brick instead of Lutetian limestone. At the Salon d’Automne in 1906, Hopper likely encountered Albert Marquet in person for the first time, perhaps seeing his Quai du Louvre and Pont Neuf which was on view in the exhibit. Hopper seems to be reaching for Marquet’s color and shadow in 1907, yet it was not until 1909 that he began to approach it. The bridge takes on a new depth and subtlety in Le Pont Royal as the painting becomes a clear precursor to the works Hopper would make upon returning to the U.S.

Edward Hopper, “Le Pont Royal,” 1909, 24x29 inches, oil on canvas. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

While Hopper’s Paris work emerged from a short four-year span, my father’s near-annual trips to Paris allowed for decades of continuous contemplation before he began to paint the city in the late 2010s. In January 2018, bedridden with the flu in a top-floor apartment in the 16th arrondissement, Johnson stared out the window at a cluster of buildings in the interior courtyard. As his condition improved, he began to sketch the view from bed, the forced stillness leading to one of his first rooftop paintings: Paris (green window). 

“Paris (Green Window),” 2018-2024, 19x27 inches, oil on canvas. © Mitchell Johnson 2026

Johnson has spent the past few years continuing to observe and internalize the city during stays in apartments spanning both banks of the river. Across all these visits, the Seine has remained a pilgrimage. Long runs down Avenue du Général Leclerc have given way to carefully timed late-afternoon walks from the 11^th down Boulevard Henri IV to catch the daily theatre of the river and the bridges in the golden evening light. This repeated return to the river has led to recent works like Louvre (Blue and Red).

“Louvre (Blue and Red),” 2025, 14x29 inches, oil on canvas. © Mitchell Johnson 2026

In Louvre (Blue and Red), Johnson “bumps into” Hopper on the river banks, unaware at the time he was painting it that L'après-midi de printemps gazes across the Seine from nearly the same spot. Louvre (Blue and Red) flattens the perspective, exploring the shape of the Pont stacked atop the Louvre. The distinct conical supports sit in harmonious contrast against the curvature of the bridge’s arches, their underbellies a play of shadow that descends into jet black in the lower right-hand quadrant. The shadow acts on its own—it is not a device to create luminosity, rather it is an independent color. 

From this right side of the painting, the bridge reels us into the scene. The distinctly Parisian gray sky looming behind the Louvre enhances the luminosity on the side of the bridge, the Pavillon, and, most strikingly, the cargo hold on the river barge. The boat unites the painting—its bold color blocks bring the composition together, the aqua blue of the cargo against the army green Seine urging us to pause and really look at the river the next time we walk along its banks. The painting is unmistakably Paris, yet Johnson avoids turning the scene into allegory. He leans into the challenge, using the Pont Royal and the Pavillon not as picturesque subjects but as a framework for exploring color, light, and shape. 

Hopper never returned to Paris after 1910. Letters from his stays reveal how deeply the city impacted him, yet once back in the U.S., he downplayed France’s influence on his work, claiming to be more interested in the American landscape. He spent his summers painting in New England and, in 1930, rented a home in South Truro on Cape Cod with his wife Jo. The couple loved Truro and built a summer house and studio in the town, returning nearly every summer until Hopper’s death. Working in the solitude of the country, Hopper produced some of his most iconic landscapes, capturing the soft summer glow on the barns, cottages, and surrounding dunes. 

In 2005, my father drove to the tip of Cape Cod after hanging an exhibit in Chatham to spend a few days in Truro, completely unaware of Hopper’s connection to the town. It was not the barns tucked in the dunes but rather the whitewashed cottages with greyish black shingles sitting against Cape Cod Bay that grabbed his interest. The next year, we returned to Truro as a family, staying in an upstairs room of an old motel overlooking a dozen of these cottages. My father observed these buildings from our window, watching their walls shift from bright white to soft grey over the course of the day. Since that first visit some twenty years ago, he has gotten to know the view intimately, staying in this same room every summer.

Johnson’s works from Truro have become some of his most widely recognized paintings, yet they continue to evolve. As with Paris, by returning to the same place year after year, he keeps pulling back layers and finding new directions. One of my recent personal favorites is North Truro (Dusk) from earlier this year. As nightfall approaches, Johnson explores how elements that, a few hours prior, stood distinctly on their own now begin to merge. The once light blue sky and the left wall of the once shimmering white cottage collapse into a grayish blue along with the Bay. An overhanging tree descends into the darkness of the roof, with the exception of a rectangular strip of pinkish beige mirroring the hue of the sand below.

“North Truro (Dusk),” 2025, 14x18 inches, oil/canvas. © Mitchell Johnson 2026

Truro changes quickly as night sets in, its energy slips into emptiness as the beachgoers disappear and the roads go quiet. North Truro (Dusk) does not seek to recount this story, but it inadvertently catches the distinct sensation of a Cape Cod evening. The almost eerie porch light, its yellow-orange glow against the wall and window frame, adds a moment of theatre next to the beautiful flatness of sand, greenery, and sky. Each wall of the cottage holds a different hue, yet the shapes interlock seamlessly—a quiet testament to nearly two decades of watching this nightly transition and to the exhibition’s title, Personal Color. 

In a 2004 Artnews review, after seeing my father’s Los Angeles exhibition at Terrence Rogers Fine Art, critic Susan Emerling wrote:

“Mitchell Johnson’s latest oil paintings of European beach scenes are fresh and pleasing. Using large brushy strokes and bright, often improbable colors, Johnson gives dynamic form to everyday life with an Impressionistic sensibility.

… Also on view were eight small canvases painted on the island of Bornholm, Denmark, that picture A-frame houses in bright blocks of color against flat blue skies. The clean, crisp homes looked intimate and inviting, but the landscapes seemed timeless and empty, forlorn in a way that recalls Edward Hopper’s small-town scenes.”

Emerling’s words, published a year before my father’s first trip to North Truro, reflect not a shared style but rather a shared fascination with the distinct moments of light and space that make Paris and Cape Cod places like no other. Johnson has never sought to retrace Hopper’s footsteps; at times, his own path has simply led him to the same place. This time, that place is Galerie Mercier.

Read more of Luca Johnson’s writing at Umbra on Substack. WM