Eric Lee-Johnson was born in Suva, Fiji in 1908, studying at the Elam School of Art in Auckland, New Zealand. In 1930 he moved to London, where he enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He became a member of the Society of Industrial Artists, although little is known of his activities in this field; he also took up photography. After returning to New Zealand he established himself primarily as a painter, before his talent as a photographer was rediscovered in the late 1980s.
Painter, designer and photographer, Eric Lee-Johnson was born Eric Albert Johnson on 8 November 1908 in Suva, Fiji, then a British colony. He showed his artistic inclination as a young boy and aged 16 he won a place at the Elam School of Art in Auckland, New Zealand where he first began questioning conventions in current New Zealand painting. In 1926 he joined the newspaper publishers, Wilson and Horton, as a lithograph artist and illustrator.
In order to pursue his artistic career, in 1930 Lee-Johnson moved to England, finding work in London as a designer and typographer at an advertising agency. He mixed with fellow expatriates such as Hector Bolitho, Geoffrey de Montalk, Jocelyn Mays and A. R. D. Fairburn, and enrolled at evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, exhibiting paintings at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He also took up photography. He became member of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA) founded by Milner Gray and aimed at ‘becoming a controlling authority to advance and protect the interests of Industrial Artists and at raising the standard of Industrial Art in this country, both from an economic and cultural standpoint’ (NZ Design History). Other New Zealand artists employed at the SIA were his friend from Elam days, designer and artist James Boswell, and the radical filmmaker and kinetic artist, Len Lye. Little is known of Lee-Johnson’s activities as an industrial designer; as with his photography, he probably felt that knowledge of his work as a commercial designer could compromise his reputation as a painter. Lee-Johnson’s work from 1931–36 was informed by contemporary German typography, graphics and European poster design. However, the only known example of his work in this field was the design of the packaging for long-playing gramophone needles that he realised for the record shop Alfred Imhof & Sons Ltd of 110 New Oxford Street, London W1, while he was at Arks Publicity Ltd. The modernist design employed a new font type and high contrast tonal fields; typical of the work of many London designers, it was also ‘slightly whimsical’ (NZ Design History). Examples of Lee-Johnson’s black and white London images, including views of Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross underground station on a rainy night, beautifully capturing the city lights reflected in the wet pavement, are now held at the Museum of New Zealand.
After Lee-Johnson moved to Wellington, New Zealand in 1938, his career as an industrial designer came to an end. He worked as a commercial artist in an advertising agency and also as a freelance photographer. In 1939 he was elected a member of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, serving a term on the Committee of Management of the National Art Gallery. As a painter, he was encouraged by Howard Wadman, editor of Art in New Zealand. He also lived in increasingly remote parts of New Zealand, keen to move his country's art away from a dependence on European traditions, in favour of its own native influences. In the 1950s Lee-Johnson's series of paintings of northern New Zealand and topographical drawings documenting the architecture of some surviving early wooden buildings, contributed to launch a whole new romantic movement in New Zealand art. His work from the 1960s and 1970s featured landscapes and Pacific images, often incorporating found objects, such as shells and stones. He also experimented with abstraction and Maori motifs. Lee-Johnson's reputation was primarily as a painter, and few were aware that he was also a talented photographer. It was John Turner from the Elam School of Art who first discovered his large collection of negatives and contact prints in 1989. The inclusion of Lee-Johnson's photographs in a major show at Auckland City Art Gallery in 1992, at the end of his life, eventually econfirmed his importance in New Zealand’s photographic history.
Eric Lee-Johnson died in hospital in Auckland, New Zealand in 1993. His work is not currently represented in any UK public collections.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Eric Lee-Johnson]
Publications related to [Eric Lee-Johnson] in the Ben Uri Library