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Painting History
By Sam T. Clover
In 1941, a 24-year-old artist named Jacob Lawrence had an exhibition at New York's Downtown Gallery-and quietly made history. He was the first African-American artist to be shown by a major commercial New York gallery, and the work on view-a 60-painting series titled The Great Migration of the Negro (1941)-was among the first to treat African-American history with the grandeur of an epic, in a bold modern style. Lawrence was already known in New York's black community for meticulously researched, vividly painted series like The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture (1938), about the 18th-century Haitian revolutionary leader, and The Life of Frederick Douglass (1939). But The Migration of the Negro catapulted Lawrence into the spotlight, in both his own community and the international art world.
Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, on view November 8-February 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, features more than 200 works by this great American storyteller-including some never before shown publicly-in the most comprehensive survey of his artistic development and creative process. The exhibition examines Lawrence's distinctive, near-abstract style, and his commitment to socially relevant subjects, while placing him in the broader history of American modernist painting.
Harlem Heyday
Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, NJ, and raised largely by his mother, Lawrence moved to Harlem with his family in 1930. Still abuzz with the heady cultural life of the Harlem Renaissance, the neighborhood was Lawrence's artistic crucible-the place where he went to school, walked the streets, and met leading black intellectuals like Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright. And it was there, in community art centers, that he learned to paint. "Most of my work depicts events from the many Harlems which exist throughout the United States," Lawrence once said. "This is my genre...the happiness, tragedies and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto."
Lawrence never planned to study art. "It was just something I liked to do," he said. Inspired by the bold patterns and colors in his mother's apartment and the zig-zagging laundry lines and fire escapes of his neighborhood, Lawrence created his own expressive designs, using the inexpensive tempera paints and paper he found at Utopia Children's House, a community day care center. It was there that he met Charles Alston, a classically trained African-American artist who taught him the pioneering techniques of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow, an arts educator at Columbia University, believed that studying geometric patterns-copying the design of a rug, for example-was the best way to learn compositional structure.
Lawrence studied with Alston throughout the 1930s, and with the sculptor and cultural leader Augusta Savage. Gradually, he refined his working method, first preparing an underdrawing, then applying one or more coats of quick-drying poster paints. With their flat, opaque colors, rhythmic designs and tight perspectives, Lawrence's paintings suggested a frozen-movement quality reminiscent of film stills-a feeling Lawrence exploited in his multi-painting historical series.
"A Larger Concern"
After his breakthrough show at the Downtown Gallery, Lawrence's career took off, with national and international tours of his work, a teaching stint with Josef Albers at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and considerable media attention. But these achievements, while outwardly impressive, fueled his interior struggle as a successful black painter in an overwhelmingly white art world. This tension is reflected in works of the late 1940s, like Dancing Doll (1947), in which a black street vendor, his broad back like a shadow in the foreground, hawks tiny dolls to a white audience-at the center of the action, yet somehow removed from it.
As the Civil Rights Movement exploded in the late 1950s and early '60s, Lawrence responded with heart-wrenching images of racial conflict. In Two Rebels (1963), for example, a quartet of burly white police officers drag the limply resisting bodies of two black men away from an onlooking crowd. But during these tumultuous years Lawrence also painted quieter scenes of everyday life, in offices, libraries, and pool halls. While America struggled to come to terms with racism, Lawrence's Builders series showed black and white construction workers laboring together-revealing a hard-won optimism about the country and its future.
From the 1970s until his death in June 2000, Lawrence's paintings became increasingly intricate, and his approach often veered toward abstraction. But he never lost touch with the figurative style in which he captured not only the words and deeds of African Americans, but universal themes of struggle and triumph. "Years ago, I was just interested in expressing the Negro in American life," Lawrence said in the late 1960s, "but a larger concern, an expression of humanity and of America, developed." In this sense, as in many others, Jacob Lawrence continues to float over the line.
Lawrence Around Town
This season, the Whitney isn't the only spot in New York to catch up with Jacob Lawrence's art. At the Queens Museum of Art October 16-January 27, Jacob Lawrence: The John Brown Series showcases 22 silk-screen prints, made in 1977, that recount the story of 19th-century anti-slavery Abolitionist John Brown. The Studio Museum in Harlem joins in with Jacob Lawrence (October 4-early February), a small exhibition of the artist's works in the museum's lobby. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art through November 25, the exhibition Paintings on Paper: Recent Acquisitions features a newcomer to the Met's Lawrence holdings: The Photographer (1942), a vivid street scene depicting a photographer snapping a family photo portrait on a bustling Harlem corner.
You don't even need to visit a museum to see one of Lawrence's final public artworks-just head to the N, R, Q, and W subway lines in the Times Square Station. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority as part of its Arts for Transit program, New York in Transit-a large-scale glass mosaic mural-celebrates the city's vibrant cultural and recreational pastimes. Best of all, it's one Lawrence work that's on permanent exhibition.
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