Lawrence, Jacob 1917–

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Jacob Lawrence 1917–

Painter, educator

At a Glance…

Inspired by Giotto as Well as Black Aesthetic

Nurtured by Harlem Intellectuals

L’Ouverture, Tubman, and Douglass

Jacob Lawrence is America’s most honored black painter. He has been awarded the kind of recognition most artists only dream of: exhibits in major museums; honorary doctorates; prizes; foundation grants; membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Council of the Arts, and the National Academy of Design; an invitation to paint the 1977 presidential inauguration of Jimmy Carter; and a National Medal of Arts from President George Bush, bestowed on him in 1990.

Lawrence, who has taught art throughout the country, has also produced commissioned book and magazine illustrations, murals, posters, drawings, and prints. Among these are a 1976 print for the United States Bicentennial, illustrations for a 1983 special edition of John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, and a 1984 poster for the National Urban League.

At 24 Lawrence became successful nearly overnight when his historic series of 60 paintings, Migration of the Negro —depicting the movement of rural southern blacks to the industrial North in search of work during World War I—was displayed at New York City’s Downtown Gallery in 1941. He made history as the first black artist to be represented by a New York gallery, in the process becoming a standard-bearer for future generations of black artists.

In the decades that followed Lawrence received national acclaim for his powerful paintings about the lives of legendary black historical figures, including eighteenth-century Haitian general and liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture and American abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Major retrospectives of his works were mounted in museums nationwide, among them New York’s Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Seattle Art Museum in Washington. In 1983 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, firmly securing his place as the America’s preeminent black artist.

Of Lawrence’s significance, art reviewer John Russell wrote in the New York Times: “Lawrence is one of the great American storytellers—or, as might be better said, one of the great tellers of the American story. One by one, key figures in black American experience—Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, [American abolitionist] John Brown, Harriet Tubman—are presented not in single

At a Glance…

Born Jacob Armstead Lawrence, September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, NJ; son of Jacob and Rosalee (Armstead) Lawrence; married Gwendolyn Clarine Knight (a painter), July 24, 1941. Education: Studied with Charles Alston and Henry Bannarn at Works Project Administration (WPA) art classes, Harlem Art Workshop, New York City, 1934-37; studied with Anton Refregier, Sol Wilson, Philip Reisman, and Eugene Moreley, American Artists School, New York City, 1937-39.

Artist; educator. Worked on WPA federal art project, 1939-41; painted in New York City, 1930s-1971, showing at Downtown Gallery, Alan Gallery, and Terry Dintenfass Gallery; taught design and figure drawing at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, 1955-70; exhibited work, 1962, and painted for eight months in Nigeria, 1964; instructor at Art Students League, New York City, 1967-69; taught at University of Washington, Seattle, 1971-83, professor emeritus, 1983—; major retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum, 1960; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 1974; Seattle Art Museum, 1986; and Art Institute of Chicago and Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992; has also mounted one-man exhibitions as the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Commissioner of the National Council of the Arts. Military service: Served in U.S. Coast Guard and Navy, 1943-45.

Selected awards: Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowships, 1940, 1941, 1942; John Simon Guggenheim post-service fellowship, 1946-47; National Institute of Arts and Letters citation and grant, 1953; Ford Foundation grant, 1960-61; NAACP Spingarn Medal, 1970; recipient of National Medal of Arts from President George Bush, 1990; numerous honorary degrees.

Addresses: c/o Seattle Art Museum, Volunteer Park, Seattle, WA 98112.

images but in sequences that have a cumulative effect.... Jacob Lawrence’s is not an art of protest, or of propaganda. It is history, with all that this implies... [and] the work of a poet, a man of fire and daring.”

Lawrence has attributed his success to the black experience that is his heritage. From his youth, Lawrence has faithfully chronicled that experience—particularly the struggle of black Americans to obtain freedom and justice. As an adult he extended this theme to include all human effort towards liberty. His paintbrush has captured everything from slave revolts and ghetto life to the devastation of war and attempts by blacks and whites to rebuild America. Yet each painting reveals his sense of humor as well as his pain and offers hope for the human condition.

Inspired by Giotto as Well as Black Aesthetic

Lawrence’s compositions—his customary medium is water-based paint on paper or hardboard panels—often portray simplified human figures against an array of overlapping abstract forms in brilliant colors and bold designs. The painter has said that his early inspiration came from pre-Renaissance Florentine painter Giotto and 1930s Mexican painter Jose Orozco, who was part of the school of social realism. Above all, Lawrence was quoted as saying in the Crisis that he “was inspired by the black aesthetic by which we are surrounded, motivated to manipulate form, color, space, line and texture to depict our life, and stimulated by the beauty and poignancy of our environment.”

The oldest of three siblings, Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1930, six years after his parents separated, the boy moved with his mother to New York City’s Harlem, where he finished elementary school and went to Frederick Douglass Junior High School. Much of his black-history education, however, came from the Harlem community and from the leading intellectuals and artists living there in the 1930s.

To keep the children busy while she worked, Lawrence’s mother sent them to an after-school arts and crafts program at a neighborhood settlement house run by painter and sculptor Charles Alston. Here Lawrence learned to draw, using crayons and poster paints. Alston was one of the first to recognize the budding painter’s abilities. Lawrence later took classes with him and Henry Bannarn at the Harlem Art Workshop, set up in Alston’s studio and funded by the Depression-era federal Works Project Administration (WPA).

Nurtured by Harlem Intellectuals

With money saved from doing odd jobs, Lawrence rented space in Alston’s studio so that he could paint. There he met and absorbed the views of Harlem’s extraordinary black artists, writers, and intellectuals, including Romare Bearden, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alain Locke. He also met Augusta Savage, a community-minded sculptor who got him a job with the WPA’s Federal Arts Project in 1939. Though Lawrence did not attend her classes, he befriended one of Savage’s pupils, West Indian painter Gwendolyn Knight, whom he married in 1941.

In 1937 Lawrence won a two-year scholarship to the American Artists School, where he studied with Anton Refregier, Sol Wilson, Philip Reisman, and Eugene Moreley. Though his classes took him out of Harlem, he remained close to the community and made it the focus of his work. Soon his first, vivid Harlem “genre” paintings—Street Scene —Restaurant, Street Orator, Interior, and Interior Scene —were shown with works by his former teachers Alston and Bannarn at the school and as a one-man show at the Harlem YMCA in 1938. Lawrence continued painting Harlem scenes throughout his career, including ones that reflected his growing maturity, which resulted in the works Tombstones, Pool Parlor, Woman With Grocery Bags, and The Apartment.

Inspired by memories of community lectures and discussions, Lawrence also researched the lives of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman and resolved to narrate their dramatic stories through a series of paintings. In 41 scenes known as the Toussaint L’Ouverture series, the artist told the story of the Haitian general who fought for his country’s independence. When the series was shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939, it received public and critical praise and marked Lawrence’s first successful one-man show outside Harlem. About the show, A. D. Emmart commented in the Baltimore Sun, “These small sketches, with their economy of flat, sharply defined forms and their variations in a consistent color pattern, are charged with feeling and movement.... As a series, they constitute a striking and original work.”

L’Ouverture, Tubman, and Douglass

Buoyed by this success and driven by his own inner needs, within two years Lawrence had completed a 32-painting series, Frederick Douglass, followed by his 31-painting sequence, Harriet Tubman. The Frederick Douglass series portrayed the life of the abolitionist and editor of the first black newspaper. The Harriet Tubman series depicted the story of the escaped slave who helped others flee north on the Underground Railroad. In 1940 Lawrence received the first of three consecutive Rosenwald Fund fellowships and moved into his own studio, where he began work on his next epic.

When Migration of the Negro was shown at the Downtown Gallery in New York City, it drew such crowds and received such enthusiastic reviews that the Museum of Modern Art, also in New York, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (now the Phillips Collection), in Washington, D.C., each bought part of the 60-panel series and split it between them. The Downtown Gallery, which represented the nation’s leading contemporary painters, added Lawrence to their list. In addition to this, having nearly half of the paintings reproduced in Fortune magazine brought him widespread acclaim. At the time, Fortune noted that “[Lawrence’s] use of harsh primary colors and his extreme simplicity of artistic statement have extraordinary force.”

In 1941, while on his honeymoon in New Orleans, Lawrence finished a 22-panel series about the life of white abolitionist John Brown, who was hanged for treason after attempting to free southern slaves. Although Ellen Wheat, in her book Jacob Lawrence, American Painter, has called the John Brown series “the apogee of Lawrence’s dramatic narrative abilities,” it received mixed reviews when it opened at the Downtown Gallery in 1942—though it was later exhibited at museums across the country.

Wartime Inspiration

Lawrence kept painting while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, then in the Navy, from 1943 to 1945. He produced 48 works about his wartime experiences, which were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1945, with Guggenheim Foundation funding, Lawrence completed 14 paintings called War that were based on his memories of serving aboard an overseas troop carrier converted into a hospital. Time magazine called War “his best work yet.” Also in 1947 Lawrence traveled through the segregated South to document life among blacks during the postwar period, producing ten paintings for Fortune magazine titled In the Heart of the Black Belt.

But the psychological pressures resulting from his dizzying success proved too much for the painter, and in 1949, Lawrence voluntarily admitted himself to Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York, for treatment of a nervous disorder. The personal growth he experienced during nine months there was expressed in 11 works about his fellow patients titled Hospital.

In what Wheat has called his “flight into fantasy,” Lawrence added more experimental and complex patterns to his designs in the early 1950s abstract Theater series based on his recollection of trips to Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater. When the series was exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in 1953, one New York Times reviewer described it as having the “shrill color and line that cuts like a hot, sharp knife,” revealing “the whole nerve of the theater and entertainment world.” At the same time, Lawrence’s continuing series of Harlem paintings became more detailed, with graphic depictions of inner-city decline.

Broadened Outlook

Lawrence broadened his historical outlook in his next series, 1955’s Struggle: From the History of the American People. The 60 paintings contained therein depict black and white faces and include scenes of American patriot Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the first stagecoach movement west. “Years ago, I was just interested in expressing the Negro in American life,” Lawrence was quoted as saying in Jacob Lawrence, American Painter, “but a larger concern, an expression of humanity and of America, developed.” For Lawrence, the black American and the American struggle had become one.

During the explosive 1960s Lawrence produced what some critics have called his most obvious “protest” works—about civil rights struggles in the South. One painting, titled The Ordeal of Alice, portrays a young black girl dressed in white attempting to enter a newly desegregated Southern school while demonic tormentors pierce her with arrows in a scene reminiscent of the ordeal of a religious martyr.

In 1963 Lawrence speculated in Newsweek about possible reactions to his work, reflecting, “Maybe they’ll hate the painter for holding up a mirror. He doesn’t like hate, but he cannot drop the mirror because if he did his art would disappear, and himself with it.” Still, Lawrence did not formally become part of the black art movement, though he recognized its validity and importance. “To me, [the ’black art’ label] doesn’t matter,” he told Wheat in 1984. “I work out of my experience, and if somebody wants to call that black art, that’s all right.”

In the late 1960s Lawrence progressed from portraying scenes of racial injustice to portraying those of racial harmony. His loosely linked Builders series depicts blacks and whites working together on building projects, scenes symbolic of rebuilding society. Observed Wheat, “With... Builders, Lawrence’s work assumes a major shift in tone: it is more philosophical and objective, more symbolic, less regionally specific and emotive.”

Despite ever-changing artistic and political trends, Lawrence has remained true to his own creative path. Perhaps New York Times contributor Hilton Kramer best summed up Lawrence’s life and purpose when he wrote: “Unlike other painters of his generation, Mr. Lawrence has never abandoned the social and artistic commitments his work assumed in its earliest stages. The result is a large body of work that is exceptional both in thematic coherence and in sheer expressive force.... Only an artist for whom history is a living issue—a matter of personal fate rather then intellectual choice—could have sustained so protracted a commitment.”

Selected works

Paintings

Street Scene—Restaurant, Street Orator, Interior, Interior Scene, 1936-38.

Toussaint L’Ouverture series, 1937-38.

Frederick Douglass series, 1938-39.

Harriet Tubman series, 1939-40.

Migration of the Negro series, 1940-41.

John Brown series, 1941.

Harlem series, 1941-42.

Pool Parlor, 1942.

Tombstones, 1942.

The Apartment, 1943.

Woman With Grocery Bags, 1943.

Coast Guard series, 1943-45.

War series, 1946-47.

Hospital series, 1950.

Slums, 1950.

Theater series, 1951-52.

Struggle: From the History of the American People series, 1955-56.

The Ordeal of Alice, 1963.

Wounded Man, 1968.

Builders works, c. 1969—.

Illustrated books

Hughes, Langston, One-Way Ticket, Knopf, 1948.

Harriet and the Promised Land, Windmill Books/Simon & Schuster, 1967.

Aesop’s Fables, Windmill Books/Simon & Schuster, 1970.

Hersey, John, Hiroshima, Limited Editions Club, 1983.

Selected commissioned works include In the Heart of the Black Belt, Fortune magazine, 1947, and George Washington Bush, State of Washington, 1973 (paintings); President Carter’s Inaugural Ceremony, Presidential Inauguration Committee, 1977 (print); 1972 Olympic Games, Edition Olympia, 1972 (poster); cover portrait of Jesse Jackson, Time magazine, 1970; the murals Origins, Howard University, 1984; tribute to Chicago mayor Harold Washington, Harold Washington Library, 1992; Times Square restoration project, New York City, c. 1992; and Kingdome stadium project, Seattle.