Lawrence, Jacob

September 7, 1917
June 9, 2000

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, painter and draftsman Jacob Armstead Lawrence grew up in Harlem during the Great Depression, and his career owes much to that heritage. Soon after the births of his sister, Geraldine, and brother, William, in Pennsylvania, his parents separated. Seeking domestic work, Lawrence's mother brought her three children to Harlem around 1930. She enrolled them in a day-care program at Utopia House, a settlement house offering children hot lunches and after-school artsand-crafts activities at nominal cost. The arts program was run by painter Charles Alston, who recognized young Jacob Lawrence's talent and encouraged him.

Lawrence's mother was often on welfare, so Jake, as he was called, took on several jobs as a young teenager to help support the family: He had a paper route, and he worked in a printer's shop and in a laundry. But in the evenings he continued to attend art classes, and he committed himself to painting.

From 1932 to 1937 Lawrence received training in the Harlem Art Workshops, which were supported first by the College Art Association and then by the government under the Federal Art Project of the Works Project Administration. He attended the American Artists School in New York City on scholarship from 1937 to 1939. He was still a student when he had his first one-person exhibition at the Harlem YMCA in February 1938. At twenty-one and twenty-two years of age, he served as an easel painter on "the Project" in Harlem. Swept up in the vigorous social and cultural milieu of the era following the Harlem Renaissance, Lawrence drew upon Harlem scenes and black history for his subjects, portraying the lives and aspirations of African Americans.

By 1936 Lawrence had established work space in the studio of Charles Alston at 306 West 141st Street—the renowned "306" studio that was a gathering place for people in the arts. There Lawrence worked for several years, meeting and learning from such African-American intellectuals as philosopher Alain Locke, writers Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, and painter Aaron Douglas.

Lawrence's first paintings assumed the character of social realism, a popular style of the 1930s. His earliest works date from around 1936 and are typically interior scenes or outdoor views of Harlem activity (e.g., Street Orator, 1936; Interior, 1937). He was primarily influenced by the other community artists, such as Alston, sculptor Augusta Savage, and sculptor Henry Bannarn, who believed in him and inspired him by their interest in themes of ethnic origin and social injustice.

Lawrence's general awareness of art came from his teachers as well as from books, local exhibitions, and frequent trips to the Metropolitan Museum. When he was a youth, he met painter Gwendolyn Knight, originally from Barbados, and their friendship led to marriage in 1941. Their long relationship was a vital factor in Lawrence's career.

Lawrence's art remained remarkably consistent throughout the decades. His content is presented through either genre (scenes of everyday life) or historical narrative,

and always by means of simplified, representational forms. He used water-based media applied in vivid color. Lawrence was an expressionist: He tried to convey the feeling he got from his subject through the use of expressionistic distortion and color choice, and often through cubist treatment of form and space.

A distinctive feature of Lawrence's work is his frequent use of the series format to render narrative content. Stimulated by the Harlem community's interest in the stories of legendary black leaders, he created several historical series about these heroic figures, including Toussaint L'Ouverture (1937–1938), Frederick Douglass (1938–1939), and Harriet Tubman (1939–1940). Some of his fifteen series are based on nonhistorical themes, such as Theater (1951–1952).

Jacob Lawrence received almost overnight acclaim when his Migration of the Negro series was shown at New York's prestigious Downtown Gallery in November 1941. With this exhibition, he became the first African-American artist to be represented by a major New York gallery. By the time he was thirty, he had become widely known as the foremost African-American artist in the country. In 1960 the Brooklyn Museum mounted his first retrospective exhibition, and it traveled throughout the country. In 1974 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a major retrospective of Lawrence's work, which toured nationally. In December 1983 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His third retrospective exhibition, originated by the Seattle Art Museum in 1986, drew record-breaking crowds when it toured the country. For more than forty years, Lawrence also distinguished himself as a teacher of drawing, painting, and design, first at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, in the summer of 1946, then at schools such as Pratt Institute in Saratoga Springs, New York (1955–1970), Brandeis University (spring 1965), and the New School for Social Research, New York (1966–1969).

During World War II Lawrence served in the U.S. Coast Guard (then part of the Navy), first as a steward's mate and then as a combat artist. On coming out of the service, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to paint a series about his war experiences (War, 1946–1947).

Lawrence and his wife spent eight months in Nigeria in 1964, an experience that resulted in his Nigerian series (1964). Also in the 1960s he produced powerfully strident works in response to the civil rights conflicts in America (e.g., Wounded Man, 1968). When he was appointed professor of art at the University of Washington in 1971, he and his wife moved to Seattle. He retired from teaching in 1987. After about 1968 Lawrence concentrated on works with a Builders theme that place a symbolic emphasis on humanity's aspirations and constructive potential. In 1979 he created the first of his several murals, Games, for the Kingdome Stadium in Seattle. In 1990 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George H. W. Bush. In 1999 he and his wife began plans for an art center in Harlem, but he never saw the plan realized, for he died after a long illness in 2000.

Lawrence's work is full of humor, compassion, and pictorial intensity. His central theme is human struggle. Always a social observer with a critical sensibility, he approached his subjects with a quiet didacticism. Although his work is always emotionally autobiographical, his imagery has universal appeal. Lawrence's greatest contribution to the history of art may be his reassertion of painting's narrative function. In his art's ability to speak to us through time of the often neglected episodes of African-American history and the black experience, Lawrence offers a significant link in the traditions of American history painting, American scene painting, and American figural art.

See also Douglas, Aaron; Harlem Renaissance; Hughes, Langston; Locke, Alain Leroy; McKay, Claude; Painting and Sculpture; Savage, Augusta

Bibliography

Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. Six Black Masters of American Art. Garden City, N.Y.: Zenith, 1972.

Brown, Milton W. Jacob Lawrence. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974.

Nesbett, Peter, and Michelle DuBois. The Complete Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings and Murals (1935–1999). Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Wheat, Ellen Harkins. Jacob Lawrence, American Painter. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986.

Wheat, Ellen Harkins. "Jacob Lawrence and the Legacy of Harlem." Archives of American Art Journal 26, no. 1 (1986): 18–25.

Wheat, Ellen Harkins. Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938–40. Hampton, Va., and Seattle, Wash.: Hampton University Museam: 1991.

ellen harkins wheat (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005