J. Seward Johnson Jr., Sculptor of the Hyper-Real, Dies at 89
His works often caught passers-by unawares. One was so lifelike that, after 9/11, firefighters are said to have tried to rescue it.
Credit…Susan Meiseles/Magnum Photos
By Neil Genzlinger of the New York Times
J. Seward Johnson Jr., a sculptor who may be responsible for more double takes than anyone in history thanks to his countless lifelike creations in public places — a businessman in downtown Manhattan, surfers at a Florida beach, a student eating a sandwich on a curb in Princeton, N.J. — died on Tuesday at his home in Key West, Fla. He was 89.
His family said through a spokesman that the cause was cancer.
Mr. Johnson had another distinction besides his art. As a member of the family that founded Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical and consumer products giant, he was one of six siblings who, in a high-profile court case in the 1980s, sought to overturn his father’s will, which left his vast fortune to a former maid, Barbara Piasecka Johnson, whom the senior Mr. Johnson had married late in life. A settlement was reached just before the case went to the jury, giving the children a share of the estate but leaving most of it to Mrs. Johnson.
But more enduring were the sculptures, which often caught passers-by unawares; many would pause for a closer look and, in the cellphone age, a picture. One sculpture in particular became something more than a curiosity. It was a work Mr. Johnson called “Double Check”: a seated businessman reviewing the contents of his briefcase.
The sculpture was in Liberty Park near the World Trade Center when the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, left the area in ruins. Many other artworks in the buildings and outside were destroyed that day, but the man with the briefcase, though knocked off his perch, survived, covered in debris.
The sculpture is so lifelike that firefighters are said to have tried to rescue it. It became a makeshift memorial — a symbol of endurance to some, a reminder of the bodies never recovered to others. In 2006 it was installed in the newly named Zuccotti Park, not far from its original spot.
“I thought of him as a businessman Everyman — with his briefcase — getting ready for his next appointment, and people identified with him,” Mr. Johnson told The New York Times in 2005. “So when he survived, it was as if he was one of them — surviving as well.”
John Seward Johnson Jr. was born on April 16, 1930, in New Brunswick, N.J. His father was the son of one of the founders of Johnson & Johnson. His mother, Ruth Dill Johnson, was a native of Bermuda whose father had been Bermuda’s attorney general.
Mr. Johnson, by his own admission a poor student, was sent to the Forman School in Litchfield, Conn.
“It was a place for dyslexics,” he told The Times in 2002, “although we weren’t called that then.”
He tried college at the University of Maine, where he studied poultry husbandry. (“It was the only thing they’d let me into,” he said.) Then, in 1951, he joined the Navy.
After leaving the Navy in 1955 he took a management job in the family company, but a troubled first marriage, to Barbara Kline, proved distracting. He is said to have hired private detectives to raid his own house in the middle of the night hoping to catch her in an indiscretion; she was alone, thought the detectives were intruders and shot one of them, injuring him.
Soon after their divorce in 1964, Mr. Johnson married Cecelia Joyce Horton, who got him interested in art. Sometimes they would paint together, although he wasn’t very good at it.
“I didn’t like what I could do with paint,” he told The Times, “so my wife suggested sculpture because I had some mechanical ability.”
He took some classes and made his first piece, in stainless steel. It won a contest sponsored by U.S. Steel.
“I thought, oh gee, this is great, maybe sculpture isn’t so bad after all,” Mr. Johnson told the newspaper U.S. 1 in 2002. “I never won anything after that.”
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