The Johnson Collection of American Bird Decoys

OF AMERICAN BIRD DECOYS

Linda E. Johnson is a non-profit leader who is deeply committed to public service; a lifelong athlete and competitor, she is a formidable collector who describes herself as an “inquisitive consumer of art and culture.” In short, she is a force of nature — though not comfortable being tagged as such. She does freely admit that “moderation” in any shape, is not her strong suit, and she is right! To verify her assessment, one need simply look at the multifaceted aspects of Linda’s rich and well curated life.

President and CEO of Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), Linda heads one of the largest, most innovative public library systems in the country. During her tenure, she has expanded the reach of the institution beyond its sixty-one branches to include hundreds of off-site locations, including schools, homeless shelters, senior centers, correctional facilities, and even a laundromat. She recently merged the Brooklyn Historical Society with the Library to create the Center for Brooklyn History, and has transformed BPL from a traditional to a state-of-the-art institution, offering programs in over thirty languages on multiple platforms, cultural events, author talks, and exhibitions — all open and available to everyone — and all for free.

The arts have long been integral to Linda’s career and personal life and her reach in the arts is as deep as her professional impact. She currently serves as a director of the Metropolitan Opera. Additionally, she chairs the Board of Sing for Hope and serves as a trustee of the Curtis Institute of Music. Her interest in the visual and decorative arts has

driven her in recent years to collect modern art, but she has long been deeply influenced by the early Americana she was surrounded by as a child growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

She and her late husband Harold “Hal” W. Pote had a home on Barnegat Bay in New Jersey and became fascinated by the migratory birds of Long Beach Island. As they learned about the life of bay men and the role of the decoy in that area during the 19th and early 20th centuries, they became increasingly enamored with the carvings of the region. They appreciated the connection of the decoy to folk art as well the modern craft movement; genres in which they were deeply involved as collectors and Hal as a member of the Board of the Museum of Arts and Design. Their shared interest in and attraction to the birds ultimately led to the creation of one of the great decoy collections, particularly noteworthy for its premier shorebird selections.

When asked about her and Hal’s guiding principles as collectors, Linda explains their approach as “driven by the form and surface of an object rather than the name of the maker or the geographic region where the piece was carved.” They were committed to collecting birds that were intended to be used or “hunted over,” as opposed to purely decorative examples. Relentless in their search for great examples — they successfully sought birds with dry surfaces and artistic and expressive forms.

Collecting is in her DNA; Linda began amassing her first collection when she was old enough to walk along the New Jersey coastline, carefully picking out noteworthy shells from the more common varieties strewn along the sand.

With Linda, the cliché of the apple not falling far from the tree certainly rings true. Her parents, Joan M. and Victor L. Johnson, assembled one of the great collections of early American art and antiques, amassed over a sixty-year period. Joan is still an avid collector today and Linda credits her own great “eye” to her mother. The relationship between the two is special with a “mutual trust in each other’s visual instincts and taste, relying upon each other’s collecting sensibilities above all others.”

While Linda is more of a minimalist than Joan, they touch base before “important purchases.” When Joan says she is thinking about selling or “trading up,” Linda almost always encourages her to move forward, saying, “If Joan is even thinking about deaccessioning, I am sure she should. Conversely, if I find myself on the fence about an object, Joan is always there urging me to take the leap.” Linda remembers looking at a table with her mother at the Philadelphia Antique Show when she was in her early twenties. “It was a big stretch for me at the time,” recounts Linda. “Joan didn’t hesitate to encourage me and said very earnestly, ‘The cookies only get passed around once.’”

Perennial patrons of the arts in Philadelphia and New York, the Johnson family is known for their larger-thanlife personas. Joan was a long-serving trustee of the American Folk Art Museum, and is still a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Longtime editor of Antiques and the Arts Weekly and Wunch Award recipient Laura Beach described Victor as “a force in the world of art and antiques.” However, Linda is quick to point out that it is her mother who is the “inveterate and relentless collector.” Though she cannot remember the source, Linda recalls a quote from an article about her parents’ collection which to this day makes the family smile: “Joan Johnson believes more is more.”

From both her parents, Linda learned that quality must always be paramount. She recalls the story of her parents’ hunt for a Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks when she was a child. Joan and Victor were eager to get to know the preeminent, legendary, if not eccentric,

OF AMERICAN BIRD DECOYS

dealer of Hicks’ work. On an early spring Saturday afternoon, they received the long-awaited phone call from the dealer who summoned them to see a Peaceable Kingdom he had in his home, but if they were serious, they would need to come the next day — a Sunday. Not having a babysitter for “the girls” and being certain that bringing an eleven and nine year old to the meeting would not further the cause, the next afternoon they dropped Linda and her sister off at a nearby Center City, Philadelphia movie theater, unchaperoned, for a matinee of a suitably long film: Nicholas and Alexander. The girls were left with tickets in hand, drinks and copious amounts of popcorn, and instructed to stay in their seats until their father returned for them. The negotiation for the Peaceable Kingdom went “swimmingly” — better and more quickly than the elder Johnsons anticipated. Within an hour they had secured ownership of their first Hicks and an invitation, with their daughters, for an early supper at the home of the dealer. Victor raced back to the theater to retrieve Linda and her sister. Arriving before the movie was over, he told the girls not to be disappointed that they didn’t see the end because “everyone knows what happens.” What the girls did see firsthand that evening, and repeatedly over the course of their childhoods, is that no effort was too great in the pursuit of the next masterpiece. Being surrounded by and actually using important objects from the time she was born had an impact on Linda’s eye and her aesthetic influences. She reminisces about doing homework at a circa-1800, Lancaster County, PA, painted and decorated slant-top desk with interior tulip-carved drops and carvings of vines on the sides: “Living in a home that looked like a museum was all we knew so it did not seem unusual. We understood that, except in the kitchen, we were never to put a glass on a surface without a coaster, the dogs were trained not to venture into the main living areas of the house, we knew better than to rock back in a chair or to sit on the quilts that covered our beds.” Their next-door neighbors, the Irvin and Anita Schorsch family, lived in a similar home filled with three boys and American antiques. “Tall case clocks chimed in every room of their house,” Linda recounts, “It all seemed very normal to us.”

Collectors and guests who had occasion to visit the house, known as Hidden Glen, often assumed the collection evolved after Linda and her sister were older and off at school — but this was not the case. They were simply raised not to toss the tennis ball around in the living room. “The house and its contents were in many ways members of the family. Each acquisition arrived with its own story — the history of the piece, the artist, and the provenance, as well as the story of how it landed in my parents’ collection,” Linda explains. “Not all of the vignettes are as dramatic as being left alone in a Center City, Philadelphia movie theater at the ripe old age of eleven, but many of our family’s collecting stories are equally amusing.”

Linda’s shorebird collecting was influenced by childhood friend David Schorsch, the cousin of her next-door neighbors and the son of close family friends. The first “serious” bird Linda and Hal thought about buying was an egret they saw on the cover of one of David’s early decoy catalogues. Linda saw the catalogue on a Friday and recalls that the price was not included in the mailing. Over the course of the weekend, she and Hal decided they should buy the bird “if the number wasn’t crazy.” They were drawn to the form and it reminded them of the egret that waded in back of their house at dusk — a bird they had nicknamed

“Gil” after the jazz musician Gil Scott Heron. On Monday morning Linda called David to inquire about the piece and was disappointed to learn it was already sold. Though they didn’t get that bird, it had lit a fire.

In a manner not dissimilar to her parents, whose collection grew out of a desire to appropriately furnish their Pennsylvania farm house, Linda and Hal discovered their love of shorebirds as a couple experiencing the natural wildlife of the bay that was their “backyard.” A shared interest in wild birds led to a fascination with their wooden counterparts and, in short order, they were ensconced in the world of decoys. At first the carvers of the Barnegat Bay, Tuckerton, and Cape May drew their interest, but soon they had acquired top works from Maine, Nantucket, Long Island, and Cobb Island, Virginia.

Possessing her parents’ collecting instincts and her mother’s eye, Linda sought out and acquired many of the finest examples by makers from a variety of regions. At an auction in 2005, Copley owner Steve O’Brien recalls the reaction in the room when she hammered down not one, but two “dust-jacket” turned-head black-bellied plover by Elmer Crowell: “Linda literally turned the heads of all the collectors and dealers in the auction hall when she hammered down two of the most iconic decoys existent. Prior to that auction, she and Hal had been virtual unknowns in the decoy collecting realm. I left the auction that day feeling there was definitely a new sheriff in town.” She would later add the third “dust-jacket” plover, the feeder, thereby successfully reuniting the trio featured on the cover of New England Decoys by Shirley and John Delph. O’Brien continues, “Linda impressed me that day, and the more I learn about her, the more impressed I am by her resumé.”

Now this preeminent collector has decided the time has come to share her carved acquisitions with the world. Copley is honored to bring these important works to market, while celebrating the tenacity and conviction that went into curating this stunning collection over the past decades.