AFROCENTRIC ART

Jacob Lawrence

Bright and Shining Son of the Harlem Renaissance

By Rick Bowers

Bold, jagged, triangular shapes. Mostly flat, unmixed primary or secondary colors. An abstract painting?

Wait! Are those faces of people? Is that a gun or sword? Is that dripping blood?

A quick look at a Jacob Lawrence painting will probably stop your eye. At first, it might appear to be an abstract painting of only shapes, but then, you may realize that something more is going on. Human interactions, news reporting, history?

Lawrence’s version of the human story—either as reporting of current events or reevaluating historical happenings—might be called semi-abstract, semi-narrative, semi-expressionistic or semi-something else. His work is unique—not quite this traditional art category or another one.

According to LeRonn P. Brooks, associate curator for modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Lawrence understood his figures “as pure form, but he also puts enough characterization on them that you see them as people. … Lawrence actually made figures that were in both worlds [abstract and narrative]. … I think it communicated his modernity to people who cared about aesthetics, and it also communicated his importance of community to people who cared about the narrative.”

Regardless of how we define Jacob Lawrence’s paintings, we must acknowledge that they made him one of the most widely known and popular African American artists of the 20th century, perhaps second only to Jean-Michel Basquiat. And Lawrence’s ascent began at a time in the United States of America— the 1930s—when such fame was unheard of for a black artist.

According to Art History School, “[Lawrence’s] rise to artistic prominence was rapid. He was part of the Harlem Renaissance, which was an intellectual revival of African American art and literature centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, around the 1920s and 30s. He had his first exhibition at 18, and by 1941, New York’s Downtown Gallery was exhibiting his paintings. He was one of the first black artists to be represented by a major gallery.” TOP: painting from The Migration Series (1940-41)

BOTTOM: This Is Harlem, 1943

To Preserve Their Freedom (From the Toussaint L’Ouverure series), 1988

The Making of an Artist

Lawrence was born in 1917 in Atlantic City, N.J., and later lived in Pennsylvania and then Harlem, N.Y. If there was a right place and time for a young black man who had dreams of becoming an artist, Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s was probably it. Young Lawrence’s mother encouraged him in the arts and put him in Utopia Children’s Center and its after-school art program. Then, after he quit school when he was 16, he still attended the Harlem Art Workshop and made many trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Harlem, said Brooks, “he walked into a very sophisticated mentorship structure.” There, he met the sculptor Augusta Savage, the poet Claude McKay, and many other important figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also mentored by black artist and teacher Charles Alston, who included partial abstraction of figures in his work, and Alston’s influence can clearly be seen in Lawrence’s partially abstract paintings.

Access to The New York Public Library’s 135th Street Branch and The Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints in Harlem—now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—at a time when blacks did not often have access to traditional education also enabled him to pursue advanced learning on his own.

Early Works

According to Paul Priestley of Art History School, success came very early for Lawrence, and “in 1935 at the age of 18, Lawrence had his first exhibition with the 306 Group show at the Alston Bannarn Studio in Harlem. … [Lawrence’s] early paintings depict his environment, his studio, street scenes of his neighborhood, and everyday life in Harlem.”

Alston noted that Lawrence was sensitive to the lives around him and their weaknesses, suffering, joy and strength.

Lawrence was also involved with the Harlem Community Art Center and met “Professor” Charles Seifert, a lecturer and historian who influenced his work. In 1937, he produced 41 panels that focused on Toussaint L’Ouverture, a Haitian revolutionary leader, which were later exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

“I’m sure much of what they said [about Toussaint L’Ouverture] was romanticized,” he said in a 2000 interview with

Jackson Frost. “But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that you had something to be proud of, something to look up to.”

In 1937, he also received a twoyear scholarship to the American Artists School in New York, where he would graduate in 1939. In 1938, he exhibited his Toussaint L’Ouverture paintings in his first one-man show, which was held at the Harlem YMCA.

Lawrence mainly painted with water-based media. “I think one of the reasons [I started out using those media] was economic,” he explained to Frost. “Oils were expensive. Paper and brushes were inexpensive. ... I could get a piece of brown wrapping paper. ... It was tough, strong, durable. And [jars] of color—red, yellow, blue, the primary colors—were like 15 cents a jar.”

Still poor during this time period, he supported himself and his family by delivering newspapers, picking up and delivering laundry, and working as a printer. Perhaps recalling those days of poverty and his unwavering dedication to his art, Lawrence later told the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “If everything was stripped away from me and I had no other support that I could see or appreciate, I would still paint.”

Improvement of His Lot

Afterward, with the help of sculptor and mentor Augusta Savage, he was hired by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, and two of his series panels in the late 1930s portrayed the lives of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

“I was making a fabulous salary of $23.86 a week,” he told Frost. “… I had just turned 21. To make this kind of money was fantastic.”

A $1,500 fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund in 1940 enabled him to rent a studio in Harlem and produce possibly his most famous series: The Migration Series. This series consisted of 60 18-by-12-inch panels about the migration of millions of largely rural blacks from the South to Northern, Midwestern and Western cities in the early 20th century. Just as John Steinbeck told the story of the Okies’ migration West during the 1930s in prose in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, Lawrence, a child of such migrants himself, told the story of black migrants’ quest for a better life and the discrimination and violence they faced in his paintings.

According to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “He used descriptive titles, vibrant patterns and blocks of color, and simplified, angular figures and forms to distill epic narratives into powerfully direct images.”

“I always used very primary, secondary colors, plus black and white,” Lawrence said in a 1992 interview with Elizabeth Hutton Turner, former senior curator, The Phillips Collection. “It was very minimal, and I used it more in a very direct manner. Later, I began to explore the medium of egg tempera to a greater degree where you get translucencies. … The medium [for The Migration Series] is casein tempera, which is matte. I’ve always worked in a water media. … I think … the Harriet Tubman and the Frederick Douglass work were both egg tempera, which gives a slight sheen to the surface. It’s a very beautiful medium. … The casein medium is opaque whereas the egg medium is more or less translucent. … I don’t work in oil, and I think I have found the perfect medium … for my temperament.”

Along with 27 panels from his epic Migrant Series being published in Fortune in 1941, when he was just 24, he also became the first African American to join Edith Halpert’s prestigious Downtown Gallery when the gallery exhibited the series to wide acclaim. “Lawrence had become the first black American artist to be represented

Recently discovered 1956 painting depicting a standoff between British soldiers and farmers during the Revolutionary War

Self-Portrait, 1977

by a ‘mainstream’ gallery,” Priestley said. “[He also] became the first major artist of the 20th century to be technically trained and artistically educated within the art community in Harlem.”

Still, while Lawrence is often known as a painter of the black experience and black history, his work actually includes the history of other peoples as well. Although his most famous series was probably his Migration Series, he also did paintings about war, black and white abolitionist leaders, American history around the time of the Revolutionary War, and the bombing of Hiroshima.

In the 1940s, he had a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and painted 22 panels about the life of the white abolitionist John Brown, who was hanged in 1859 after raiding Harpers Ferry in West Virginia with the intention of starting a slave revolt.

“I had never done anything prior to that time of a non-black figure,” Lawrence told Frost. “And he was a figure who was Caucasian, and he gave his life for what he believed in. …. He was a very special person in our history.”

In his 1992 book about Harriet Tubman, he wrote, “The United States is a great country. It is a great country because of people like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman.” An additional $1,200 from the Julius Rosenwald Fund had helped him finish the Migration Series and then another $1,200 from the fund had helped him complete the John Brown panels. These funds also helped him marry Gwendolyn Knight, a fellow artist.

After serving in the United States Coast Guard as an artist during World War II, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and painted what became known as his War Series. Josef Albers also invited him to teach for 10 weeks in North Carolina at the progressive Black Mountain College—his first of numerous teaching positions.

“[He] was among the first African Americans to break the color line in the highly segregated world of modern art,” according to The Fralin Museum of Art. “Celebrated for his highly original use of flat tempera color patterns in a style termed ‘dynamic cubism,’ and for his vivid storytelling, Lawrence’s paintings made visible the struggles for economic, political and racial equality.”

According to Art History School, “By 1949, Lawrence was the most prominent black artist in America.” Although the young artist had certainly benefited from some unusual breaks, he attributed much of his success to the people he met and experiences he had during his artistic development in the Harlem community during the Harlem Renaissance.

To Depression and Back

After he returned to New York, Lawrence struggled with depression and admitted himself to Hillside Hospital for nearly a year in 1949. While there, he still painted, and his 1950 Hospital Series displayed his feeling that he should paint from personal experience.

Following his experience at Hillside Hospital, he painted and taught at several prominent art schools and continued his own painting.

In the mid-1950s, during the Civil Rights Movement and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, he completed his series titled Struggle: From the History of the American People. This wellresearched series focused on the nation’s history from the 1770s to 1817 and portrayed such events as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River in 1776 and Shays’ Rebellion in the 1780s. It also included the experiences and struggles of black soldiers, native Americans and women.

Panel 1, which is titled with the 1775 words of Patrick Henry—… Is Life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?—in which Henry advocates for freedom from British rule for the colonies, also elicits questions about enslaved people and their desire for freedom. The painting is of a group of seemingly multiracial colonists calling for freedom, fists raised high in protest.

Panel 2 portrays an incident from the Boston Massacre in 1770 when the British fired on colonists and killed Crispus Attucks, who was probably of African and Native American descent.

Panel 5, titled with the caption We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!—petition of many slaves, 1773, directly spotlights the plight of enslaved people shortly before the nation’s declaration of independence from England. This panel perhaps represents the various slave revolts during the nation’s hypocritical history.

The 60s and Beyond

In the 1960s, Lawrence’s subjects included civil rights, nonviolent protest, police brutality and interracial relationships. According to Priestley, “He was known as a gentle but tough artist who in the words of art historian Patricia Hills ‘never swerved from his commitment to the struggle for a fair and just society.’”

In 1968, he published his first illustrated children’s book, Harriet and the Promised Land, which was the winner of a 1993 Parents’ Choice Award.

“He’s mega successful. He is a one of a kind,” said Tammi Lawson, curator of the art and artifacts division at the Schomburg Center. “There’s rarely an artist, a living artist who has the fame that he has while he was living, not only as a young man but throughout his whole career. He was blessed. He found his lane, and regardless of what was going on, he had his lane, and that’s what he did.”

In 1971, Lawrence became a tenured professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and taught there until 1986. He continued taking commissions, painting murals, and making prints, which he used to support nonprofits such as the Schomburg Center, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Children’s Defense Fund. He also made silkscreens and painted in gouache on paper

Two Rebels, 1963, his response to anti-segregation protests in Birmingham, Alabama

about history and everyday events in people’s lives. In 1972, he produced a print of several black runners for the Munich Olympics. In 1997, he illustrated an adaptation of Aesop’s Fables. His works were also included in others’ books, such as Gwen Everett’s John Brown: One Man Against Slavery and Walter Dean Myers’ Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Fight for Haiti’s Freedom.

He passed away on June 9, 2000, in Seattle, continuing to paint up until just weeks before his death. His paintings are held at various venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He achieved many firsts in his life, and in 1970, he became the first visual artist to be awarded the NAACP’s highest award, the Spingarn Medal, given each year to an African American.

“Some have said my art is social commentary or it’s protest,” Lawrence said. “It couldn’t be anything else if I grew up in the Harlem community and that was the source of my content.”