French paintings copied

WASHINGTON -- J. Seward Johnson Jr. makes those realistic bronze figures that you can sit next to on park benches. Now he has a new gimmick: copying famous French impressionist paintings in three dimensions.\n"Beyond the Frame," his first one-man show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, opens Sept. 13. The title explains that he's copying not only 18 impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, but also portraying the surrounding rooms and landscapes -- things the original artists left out altogether.\nVisitors will be able to walk into Vincent van Gogh's "The Bedroom" in Arles, France. They will be invited to touch the objects, to the expected horror of conservative museum folks. They will even be able to lie down on the bed, though they won't be able to get under the covers.\nJohnson spoke to reporters as he dabbed whites and pale blues on a 240-pound aluminum figure representing Mary Cassatt's "Young Girl at a Window." He sat near the original painting, part of the Corcoran's collection.\n"She looks to me as if she's gazing down into the street and thinking how she can escape the constraints of her time to take part in the street life down below, including maybe a handsome young fellow," Johnson said.\nAn iron railing will set the girl off from the Paris street, represented by a painted backdrop. The room surrounding the girl, which Cassatt didn't show at all, will have furniture and a still-life painting.\nJohnson designs his works to get close to viewers, who sometimes bump right into them. His street figures are often mistaken for real people. "Double Check," a sculpture of a man seated on a bench and looking into his briefcase, survived the collapse of the World Trade Center. It's now at Johnson's Hamilton, N.J., studio with mementos that people left around it, awaiting recasting in a new version to be placed at the Trade Center memorial site.\nThe realism of his figures apparently comes from a natural talent. Johnson said he took only a single evening class in sculpting.\n"I never went back after the first night," he said.\nAn heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, he spent a year at the University of Maine, worked a while in the family business, joined the Navy, served in the Korean War and gave up painting for sculpture in the early 1970s.\nAt 73, Johnson figures that since 1971 he's sculpted 170 of his bronze street figures.