The deeply etched figure is simultaneously an anonymous modern everyman and a reference to the famous male torsos of Classical antiquity. In the 1960s, abstraction was the dominant mode for artists. Though Lester Johnson experimented with abstraction, he stood apart from his contemporaries by retaining an interest in the human form. Combining elements of the Western figural tradition with the spontaneous gestural style of Abstract Expressionism, Johnson developed a style which is increasingly seen as a forerunner of recent figural movements such as the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s.

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