JACOB LAWRENCE, VISUAL HISTORIAN
by Joan K. Yanni
The month of February, Black History Month, is an appropriate time to highlight Jacob Lawrence, whom director Grant Holcomb calls “the visual historian of the African American Experience.”
Lawrence, who died in 2000 at the age of 82, visited MAG in 1991with his wife, Gwen, also a painter, for the opening of the exhibit, Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of Narrative Paintings. He was in Rochester again in 1994 to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Rochester. To honor the event, his 22 serigraph (silk screen) prints picturing The Legend of John Brown were on view in the Lockhart Gallery.
MAG owns 26 works by Lawrence, including two paintings and the 22 prints in the John Brown series. Both paintings, Summer Street Scene in Harlem (91.5), painted in 1948, and Gamblers (74.1), a 1954 work, are on view in the 20th century American gallery. Both are painted in tempera on board. The works are very different, one teeming with life and color, the other somber and foreboding.
Summer Street Scene presents a crowded Harlem street. One can almost hear the shouts and laughter of the children as they climb over a homemade go-cart. One boy is at the wheel and five others are hanging on the top and side of the car. They are in front of a cart from which ices are sold, with a man hunched over the top of the cart digging in the shaved ice to loosen it. A yellow-orange towel hangs over his arm, and bottles of orange, red and green syrup (orange, strawberry, cherry and lime?) with paper cups stacked on their necks, wait to be poured over the ice. The large, white wheel of the cart can be seen at the right of the painting.
Though the picture is flat, with most of the activity in the front picture plane, the background is filled with passers-by. Can you see the man with the crutch, the boy licking his cone, men in straw hats, and the window of a house? All are presented in bright blocks of color: oranges, reds, blues, greens. The vivid hues make the heat of the day seem to radiate from the canvas. The painting is filled with dynamic color and rhythmic shapes.
The mood of Gamblers is far different. It is painted in grays, blacks and browns, relieved only by the blue-green shawl of the central woman, the bright playing cards, and small red or white flowers in the buttonholes of the tall standing figures. The setting is ominous, threatening. Five figures—four men and a woman—sit hunched over a table, playing cards. Four giant, menacing figures stand over them, as if monitoring the activity.
The scene looks like a stage setting, with a screen behind the figures. The figures are flat, lacking dimension. Light comes from behind or above the backdrop, creating a pattern of triangular shapes, light and dark. The zigzag shapes are repeated in the alternating of seated and standing figures. A vine reaching from the figure on the far left to the far right unifies the composition. What is at stake in the card game? The work is unsettling, mysterious.
Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City in 1917. His parents separated in 1924 and his mother eventually moved the family to Harlem. Despite the Depression and meager family income, Lawrence had access to an after-school program that provided him with an opportunity to meet black artist Charles Alston and later Augusta Savage. He honed his craft in Harlem workshops and studios. In 1936 he won a scholarship to the American Artists School in New York City. He later taught painting at Pratt Institute, NYC, from 1958 to 1965, and from 1970 taught at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Lawrence was always interested in patterns and color. The patterns in fire escapes and nearby buildings fascinated him when he was a child. Later, like the Ashcan painters before him, he found stimulation in an environment that many would consider bleak and depressing. In 1942, when he was 25, he broke the art world’s color barrier when he became the first African American to be represented by a Manhattan gallery.
Most of his work concerns black culture and experience. In 1937 he began painting biographical panels commemorating important episodes in African-American history, including his portraits of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In these panels he was able to capture the spirit of each of his subjects by choosing a theme or idea and developing it through specific scenes or incidents. He went on in 1941-42 to paint the 60 panels of The Migration Series, describing the mass migration of African Americans to urban centers in the North. He worked in tempera, watercolor or gouache. His figures are stylized, forming strong, flat patterns. Their naïve figuration enhances their visual and emotional impact.
In his narrative paintings, he is said to have painted one color at a time. Artist Romare Bearden and art historian Harry Henderson observed that he might be working on thirty paintings in his studio, with only the blue finished in each. He would then put in all the greens, then reds, and so on. When he completed the last color in the last panel, the series would be complete.
Though narrative paintings went out of vogue in the ‘40s with the coming of abstract expressionism, Lawrence never changed his style. His unique, simplified forms derive from a variety of traditions, including Cubism and Expressionism. An exhibit of his work, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence opened at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, last year and will be traveling to museums across the country until 2003. It will be at the Detroit Institute of Arts from February 24 to May 19, 2002. A 6-foot x 36-foot mosaic mural of his New York in Transit was unveiled at the Times Square station in NYC in October.
See Voices in the Gallery: Writers on Art / Editor: Grant Holcomb Pages 68 & 71
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