Jacob Lawrence | |
|---|---|
 Lawrence in 1941 | |
| Born | (1917-09-07)September 7, 1917 Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States |
| Died | June 9, 2000(2000-06-09) (aged 82) Seattle, Washington, United States |
| Education | Harlem Community Art Center |
| Known for | Paintings portraying African-American life |
| Notable work | The Migration Series |
| Spouse | |
Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an Americanpainter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamiccubism", an art form popularized in Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art. For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday life in Harlem.[1] He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at theUniversity of Washington.
Lawrence is among the best known twentieth-century African-American painters, known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as narratives of African-American history and historical figures. At the age of 23 he gained national recognition with his 60-panelThe Migration Series, which depicted theGreat Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The series was purchased jointly by thePhillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and theMuseum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including thePhiladelphia Museum of Art, theWhitney Museum,Metropolitan Museum of Art, theBrooklyn Museum, theVirginia Museum of Fine Arts,Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and theMuseum of Northwest Art. His 1947 paintingThe Builders hangs in theWhite House.
Jacob Lawrence was born September 7, 1917, inAtlantic City, New Jersey, where his parents had migrated from the rural south. They divorced in 1924.[2] His mother put him and his two younger siblings into foster care in Philadelphia. When he was 13, he and his siblings moved toNew York City, where he reconnected with his mother in Harlem. Lawrence was introduced to art shortly after that when their mother enrolled him in after-school classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, called Utopia Children's Center, in an effort to keep him busy. The young Lawrence often drew patterns with crayons. In the beginning, he copied the patterns of his mother's carpets.
After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a laundromat and a printing plant. He continued with art, attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the noted African-American artistCharles Alston. Alston urged him to attend theHarlem Community Art Center, led by the sculptorAugusta Savage. Savage secured a scholarship to theAmerican Artists School for Lawrence and a paid position with theWorks Progress Administration, established during the Great Depression by the administration of PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt. Lawrence continued his studies as well, working with Alston andHenry Bannarn, anotherHarlem Renaissance artist, in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. He also studied at Harlem Art Workshop in New York in 1937. Harlem provided crucial training for the majority of Black artists in the United States. Lawrence was one of the first artists trained in and by the African-American community in Harlem.[3] Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans.
The "hard, bright, brittle" aspects ofHarlem during theGreat Depression inspired Lawrence as much as the colors, shapes, and patterns inside the homes of its residents. "Even in my mother's home," Lawrence told historian Paul Karlstrom, "people of my mother's generation would decorate their homes in all sorts of color... so you'd think in terms ofMatisse."[4] He used water-based media throughout his career. Lawrence started to gain some notice for his dramatic and lively portrayals of both contemporary scenes of African-American urban life as well as historical events, all of which he depicted in crisp shapes, bright, clear colors, dynamic patterns, and through revealing posture and gestures.[2]
At the very start of his career he developed the approach that made his reputation and remained his touchstone: creating series of paintings that told a story or, less often, depicted many aspects of a subject. His first were biographical accounts of key figures of the African diaspora. He was just 21 years old when his series of 41 paintings of the Haitian generalToussaint L’Ouverture, who led the revolution of the slaves that eventually gained independence, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at theBaltimore Museum of Art. This was followed by a series of paintings of the lives ofHarriet Tubman (1938–39) andFrederick Douglass (1939–40). His early work involved general depictions of everyday life in Harlem and also a major series dedicated toAfrican-American history (1940–1941).
His teacher Charles Alston assesses Lawrence's work in an essay for an exhibition at the Harlem YMCA 1938:[5]
Having thus far miraculously escaped the imprint of academic ideas and current vogues in art,... he has followed a course of development dictated by his own inner motivations... Working in the very limited medium of flat tempera he achieved a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable and exciting... Lawrence symbolizes more than anyone I know, the vitality, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially conscious generation of Negro artists.
On July 24, 1941, Lawrence married the painterGwendolyn Knight, also a student of Savage. She helped prepare thegesso panels for his paintings and contributed to the captions for the paintings in his multi-painting works.[6]
Lawrence completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitledThe Migration of the Negro orAnd the Migrants Kept Coming,[7] now called theMigration Series, in 1940–41. The series portrayed theGreat Migration, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North afterWorld War I. Because he was working intempera, which dries rapidly, he planned all the paintings in advance and then applied a single color wherever he was using it across all the scenes to maintain tonal consistency. Only then did he proceed to the next color. The series was exhibited at theDowntown Gallery in Greenwich Village, which made him the first African-American artist represented by a New York gallery. This brought him national recognition.[8] Selections from this series were featured in a 1941 issue ofFortune. The entire series was purchased jointly and divided by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which holds the odd-numbered paintings, and New York's Museum of Modern Art, which holds the even-numbered.
Another biographical series of twenty-two panels devoted to theabolitionistJohn Brown followed in 1941–42. When these pairings became too fragile to display, Lawrence, working on commission, recreated the paintings as a portfolio of silkscreen prints in 1977.[9]
In 1943,Howard Devree, wrote forThe New York Times, that Lawrence in his next series of thirty images had "even more successfully concentrated his attention on the many-sided life of his people in Harlem". He called the set "an amazing social document" and wrote:[10]
Lawrence's color is fittingly vivid for his interpretations. A strong semi-abstract approach aids him in arriving at his basic or archetypal statements. Confronting this work one feels as if vouchsafed an extraordinary elemental experience. Lawrence has grown in his use of rhythm as well as in sheer design and fluency.
In October 1943, during theSecond World War, Lawrence was drafted into theUnited States Coast Guard and served as a public affairs specialist with the first racially integrated crew on theUSCGCSea Cloud, underCarlton Skinner.[11] He continued to paint and sketch while in the Coast Guard, documenting the experience of war around the world. He produced 48 paintings during this time, all of which have been lost. He achieved the rank ofpetty officer third class.
In October and November 1944,MoMA exhibited all 60 migration panels plus 8 of the paintings Lawrence created aboard theSea Cloud. He posed, still in his uniform, in front of a sign that read: "Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series and Works Created in the US Coast Guard". The Coast Guard sent the eight paintings to exhibits around the United States. In the disorder and personnel changes that came with demobilization at the end of the war they went missing.
In 1945, he was awarded a fellowship in the fine arts by theGuggenheim Foundation.[12]In 1946,Josef Albers recruited Lawrence to join the faculty of the summer art program atBlack Mountain College.[13]
Returning to New York, Lawrence continued to paint but grew depressed; in 1949, he checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he remained for eleven months. Painting there, he produced his Hospital Series: works that were uncharacteristic of him in their focus of his subjects' emotional states as inpatients.
Between 1954 and 1956 Lawrence produced a 30-panel series called "Struggle: From the History of the American People" that depicted historical scenes from 1775 to 1817. The series, originally planned to include sixty panels, ranges from references to current events like the 1954Army-McCarthy hearings and relatively obscure or neglected aspects of American history, like a woman,Margaret Cochran Corbin, in combat or the wall built by unseen enslaved Blacks that protected the American forces at theBattle of New Orleans.[14] Rather than traditional titles, Lawrence labeled each panel with a quote. He titled a panel depicting Patrick Henry'sfamous speech with the less well-known passage: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery." A panel depicting an African American slave revolt is titled with the words of a man who sued for emancipation from slavery in 1773: "We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!"[15] The fraught politics of the mid-1950s prevented the series from finding a museum purchaser, and the panels had been sold to a private collector who re-sold them as individual works.[16] Three panels (Panels 14, 20 and 29) are lost, and three others were only located in 2017, 2020, and 2021.[17] In 2021 thePeabody Essex Museum organized an exhibition all 30 of the panels including the newly discovered ones and reproductions of the works too fragile to travel or whose location is unknown.[18]
TheBrooklyn Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of Lawrence's work in 1960.[19] In 1969, he was among 200 Black artists in a premier show sponsored by the Philadelphia School District and the Pennsylvania Civic Center Museum. The show featured some of the top names in the country, includingEllen Powell Tiberino,Horace Pippin,Nancy Elizabeth Prophet,Barbara Bullock, Jacob Lawrence,Benny Andrews,Roland Ayers,Romare Bearden,Avel de Knight,Barkley Hendricks, Paul Keene,Raymond Saunders,Louis B. Sloan,Ed Wilson,Henry Ossawa Tanner andJoshua Johnson.[20]
Lawrence illustrated several works for children.Harriet and the Promised Land appeared in 1968 and used the series of paintings that told the story of Harriet Tubman.[21] It was listed as one of the year's best illustrated books byThe New York Times and praised by theBoston Globe: "The author's artistic talents, sensitivity and insight into the black experience have resulted in a book that actually creates, within the reader, a spiritual experience." Two similar volumes based on his John Brown and Great Migration series followed.[22] Lawrence created illustrations for a selection of 18 ofAesop's Fables for Windmill Press in 1970, and theUniversity of Washington Press published the full set of 23 tales in 1998.[23]
Lawrence taught at several schools after his first stint teaching at Black Mountain College, including theNew School for Social Research, theArt Students League,Pratt Institute,[24][25] and theSkowhegan School.[26] He became a visiting artist at the University of Washington in 1970 and was professor of art there from 1971 to 1986.[19] He was graduate advisor there to lithographer and abstract painterJames Claussen.[27]
Shortly after moving to Washington state, Lawrence did a series of five paintings on the westward journey of African-American pioneerGeorge Washington Bush. These paintings are now in the collection of theState of Washington History Museum.[28]
He undertook several major commissions in this part of his career. In 1980, he completedExploration, a 40-foot-long mural made of porcelain on steel, comprising a dozen panels devoted to academic endeavor. It was installed in Howard University's Blackburn Center. TheWashington Post described it as "enormously sophisticated yet wholly unpretentious " and said:[29]
The colors are completely flat, but because the porcelain is layered, and because Lawrence here and there paints in strong black shadows, his mural has the look of a rich relief. It is full of visual rhymes. The small scene of John Henry, the steel drivin' man, in the final panel is echoed by an image of a sculptor in the art scene: He is hammering another spike, for quite different reasons, into a block of stone. This is not art that one tires of, for it is not the sort of work one can read at once.
Lawrence produced another series in 1983, eight screen prints called theHiroshima Series. Commissioned to provide full-page illustrations for a new edition of a work of his choice, Lawrence choseJohn Hersey'sHiroshima (1946). He depicted in abstract visual language several survivors at the moment of the bombing in the midst of physical and emotional destruction.[7][30]
Lawrence's paintingTheater was commissioned by the University of Washington in 1985 and installed in the main lobby of theMeany Hall for the Performing Arts.[31]
In the early 1990s Lawrence was commissioned to paint theEvents in the Life of Harold Washington mural in Chicago'sHarold Washington Library.
TheWhitney Museum of American Art produced an exhibition of Lawrence's entire career in 1974, as did theSeattle Art Museum in 1986.[19]
In 1999, he and his wife established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation for the creation, presentation and study of American art, with a particular emphasis on work by African-American artists.[19] It represents their estates[32] and maintains a searchable archive of nearly a thousand images of their work.[33]
Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death fromlung cancer on June 9, 2000, at the age of 82.[19]
Lawrence's wife,Gwendolyn Knight, outlived him and died in 2005 at the age of 91.[34]
The eighteen institutions that awarded Lawrence honorary degrees includeHarvard University,Yale University,Howard University,Amherst College, andNew York University.[19]
The New York Times described him as "one of America's leading modern figurative painters" and "among the most impassioned visual chroniclers of the African-American experience."[19] Shortly before his death he stated: "...for me, a painting should have three things: universality, clarity and strength. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good. Universality so that it may be understood by all men."[38]
A retrospective exhibition of Lawrence's work, planned before his death, opened at the Phillips Collection in May 2001 and travelled to theWhitney Museum of American Art, theDetroit Institute of Fine Arts, theLos Angeles County Museum of Art, and theMuseum of Fine Arts, Houston.[39] The exhibit was meant to coincide with the publication ofJacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999), A Catalogue Raisonne.[40] His last commissioned public work, the mosaic muralNew York in Transit made ofMurano glass was installed in October 2001 in theTimes Square subway station in New York City.[41][42]
In 2005,Dixie Café, a 1948 brush-and-ink drawing by Lawrence, was selected to suggest TheCivil Rights Act of 1964 in a U.S. postage stamp panel commemorating milestones of the Civil Rights Movement. The stamp sheet was calledTo Form A More Perfect Union.[43]
In May 2007, theWhite House Historical Association purchased Lawrence'sThe Builders (1947) at auction for $2.5 million. The painting has hung in the White HouseGreen Room since 2009.[44][45]
From 14 September 2013 – 13 April 2014, theWalters Art Museum exhibited Jacob Lawrence’sGenesis Series created in 1990.
From 8 October 2016 – 8 January 2017, The Phillips Collection exhibitedPeople on the Move: Beauty and Struggle in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. The exhibit presented The Phillips Collection odd-numbered panels with the Museum of Modern Art’s even-numbered panels to display all 60 panels ofThe Migration Series.[46]
From 7 January–30 April 2017 The Phillips Collection exhibitedThe Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, 15 silkscreen prints Lawrence created between 1986 and 1997, distilled from his 41 paintings of L’Ouverture he created at the start of his career. To create these prints Lawrence worked with master printmakerLou Stovall.[47]
In 2020, the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts organizedJacob Lawrence: The American Struggle from Lawrence’sStruggle: From the History of the American People series created between 1954–1956. It was the first museum exhibition of the paintings and first time the works were shown together since 1958. It included panels found in 2020 and 2021 and reproductions of the works too fragile to travel or whose location is unknown (Panel 14, Panel 20, and Panel 29). The exhibit was accompanied by works from contemporary artistsDerrick Adams,Bethany Collins, andHank Willis Thomas. Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle was exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum January 18–August 9, 2020;[18] the Metropolitan Museum of Art August 29–November 1, 2020;[48][49] the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama, November 20, 2020 – February 7, 2021;[50] the Seattle Art Museum March 5–May 23, 2021;[51] and The Phillips Collection June 26–September 19, 2021.[52] The catalog was edited by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron BailyISBN 978-0-295-74704-0
TheSeattle Art Museum offers the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, a $10,000 award to "individuals whose original work reflects the Lawrences' concern with artistic excellence, education, mentorship and scholarship within the cultural contexts and value systems that informed their work and the work of other artists of color."[53]The Jacob Lawrence Gallery at theUniversity of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design offers an annual Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency.[54]
His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including theBritish Museum,[55] theMetropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[56] the Museum of Modern Art, theWhitney Museum, thePhillips Collection, theBrooklyn Museum, theNational Gallery of Art[57] andReynolda House Museum of American Art, theArt Institute Chicago, theMadison Museum of Contemporary Art, theKalamazoo Institute of Arts, theMinneapolis Institute of Art, theMinnesota Museum of American Art, theSavannah College of Art and Design Museum, theSeattle Art Museum, theBirmingham Museum of Art,[58] theIndianapolis Museum of Art,[59] theUniversity of Michigan Museum of Art,[60] theNorth Carolina Museum of Art,[61] thePrinceton University Art Museum,[62] theMusei Vaticani,[63] thePaul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering,[64] thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,[65] theSaint Louis Art Museum,[66] theVirginia Museum of Fine Arts,[67] theStudio Museum in Harlem,[68] thePhiladelphia Museum of Art,[69] thePortland Art Museum,[70] theHudson River Museum,[71] andThe Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
