Michael Johnson was one of the many contributing artists to the wonderful lifestyle magazines of the 1960s. In the early sixties women’s magazines became very popular and artists such as Johnson saw the opportunity to make a name for themselves in the heart of London at a time when the city would soon become the epicentre of pop culture.

Johnson left the world of fine art which he had studied to take on commissions for magazines such as Woman, Women’s Own, Homes and Gardens, Women’s Mirror and Women’s Journal.

These magazines offered British housewives far removed from the hip glamour of London a form of escape with stories of romance in exotic locations featuring richly coloured illustrations which sold in huge numbers. The short stories and novel serialisations were of course only a small part of the overall content of the magazines which also included fashion tips, relationship and family advice, recipes and celebrity gossip.

They are of course mostly clichéd images very much of their period but they also play an important part of our cultural history. Artists of the genre quickly saw that women were on the cusp of breaking free of the dowdy shackles that had previously bound them, there was a sense of liberation afoot and Johnson and others saw value in that.

This was the era of James Bond when glamour was very much the focus of films, books and magazines By 1969 Johnson had moved to the United States and soon began working on commissions for Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Day, McCalls and Sports Illustrated as well as book cover illustrations. Johnson moved to the South of France and worked on a book Aeroplane with Sir Norman Foster from 2000-2005.

See also:

Romance 1960s Style

History and Artwork of Petticoat Magazine