Jacob Lawrence [1917

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Jacob Lawrence [1917

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Title: Jacob Lawrence [1917

1
Jacob Lawrence1917 2000

The Migration Series, No 57 c. 1940 - 1941

2
Jacob Lawrence is regarded as one of the masters
of African-American art.

Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
When his parents separated, Lawrence and his
siblings moved with their mother first to
Pennsylvania and eventually to Harlem.
To keep her young son busy, Rose Lawrence
enrolled young Jacob in art classes, where he
showed early promise.

6
Jacob Lawrence age 6

Both she and the artists father had
come upa phrase used to indicate one of the
most important events in African American history
since Reconstruction
The migration of African Americans out of the
rural South.

This exodus was gathering strength at the time of
World War I, and fundamentally altered the ethnic
mix of New York City and great industrial centers
such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and
Pittsburgh.

In the late 1930s, the American artist Jacob
Lawrence began producing extended narratives
composed of multiple small paintings that were
based on history or biography.

Lawrence started "The Migration of the Negro" --
that's the complete original title of his series
-- in 1940, when he was 22.
He was born in New Jersey to parents who'd
recently left the South, had grown up in
Pennsylvania and had lived in Harlem since his
early teens.

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He settled with his mother and two siblings in
Harlem at age thirteen.
Harlem in the 1920s was rich in talent and
creativity, and young Jacob, encouraged by
well-known painter Charles Alston and sculptor
Augusta Savage, dared to hope he could earn his
living as an artist.

One of his first mentors was African-American
sculptor Augusta Savage, who continued to guide
his career in later years.

Augusta Savage, born Augusta Christine Fells
(February 29, 1892 March 26, 1962) was an
African-American sculptor associated with the
Harlem Renaissance.
She was also a teacher and her studio was
important to the careers of a rising generation
of artists who would become nationally known.
She worked for equal rights for African Americans
in the arts.

She was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida.
She began making clay figures as a child, mostly
small animals, but her father would beat her when
he found her sculptures.
This was because at that time, he believed her
sculpture to be a sinful practice, based upon his
interpretation of the "graven images" portion of
the Bible.
After the family moved to West Palm Beach, she
sculpted a Virgin Mary figure, and, upon seeing
it, her father changed his mind, regretting his
past actions.
The principal of her new school recognized and
encouraged her talent, and paid her one dollar a
day to teach modeling during her senior year.
This began a life-long commitment to teaching as
well as to art.

17
Augusta Savage

She Augusta was the first person to give me
the idea of being an artist as a job, Lawrence
later recounted.
I always wanted to be an artist, but assumed Id
have to work in a laundry or something of that
nature.

Lawrences greatest inspiration came from the
people and places of his Harlem neighborhood.
Everything was open to his paintbrushfamilies,
architecture, landmarks, even Harlems famous
brownstones.
He was one of the artists who was a part of the
Harlem Renaissance.

Although younger than most of the artists,
Lawrence had a unique painting style and was
determined to use his paintings as positive
depictions of black life in America.
To further excel at his craft, Lawrence attended
New Yorks American Artists School from 1937 to
1939.

Lawrence noted that the 1930s in Harlem "was
actually a wonderful period . . .although we
didn't know this at the time. Of course it wasn't
wonderful for our parents. For them, it was a
struggle, but for the younger people coming along
like myself, there was a real vitality in the
community."

Just before World War II, Lawrence married fellow
painter Gwendolyn Knight, also a student of
Augusta Savage.
Knight would be his partner for decades to come.
The couple remained married until Lawrences
death.

Lawrence was deeply confident in his identity as
a black man, having been raised around other
blacks who constantly affirmed his identity.
Yet Lawrence also knew that other blacks were
suffering from the ravages of discrimination and
racism.
He also was schooled in the history of Africans
in America. Determined to meld his painting with
his social awareness, Lawrence painted several
series of works with different historical themes.

When he won a grant to paint the "Migration"
pictures, Lawrence hadn't had much formal
training and was barely launched on his career,
though he'd been in contact with some of the
artistic leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.

The subject of the migration occurred to him in
the mid-1930s.
To prepare, Lawrence recalled anecdotes told by
family and friends and spent months at the Harlem
branch of the New York Public Library researching
historical events.

The 60 hardboard panels of "Migration," only 12
by 18 inches each, walk us through the flight of
African Americans from the rural South around the
time of World War I.

Lawrence frequently called his style dynamic
cubism.
The dynamism is present in his use of vibrant
colors and designs that resemble African-American
quilts and textiles found in Africa.
The cubism is present in the flat, often angled
layers of the subjects in his work.

In order to add something to their lives, black
families decorated their tenements and their
homes in all of these colors..... It's only in
retrospect that I realized I was surrounded by
art.
You'd walk Seventh Avenue and took in the
windows and you'd see all these colors in the
depths of the depression. All these colors.

Lawrence used the same palate of colors
throughout the whole series.
He did not mix colors.
By using these colors, it unifies not only the
pictures, but also their theme.

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He was the first visual artist to engage this
important topic, and he envisioned his work in a
form unique to him
A painted and written narrative in the spirit of
the West African griota professional poet
renowned as a repository of tradition and history.

35
Panel no. 58

The Migration Series was painted in tempera paint
on small boards (here, twelve by eighteen inches)
prepared with a shiny white glue base called
gesso that emerges on the surface as tiny,
textured dots.

By far the most famous of these is The Migration
Series (1941), a sequence of 60 paintings
depicting the mass movement of African Americans
from the rural South to the urban North between
World War I and World War IIa development that
had previously received little or no widespread
attention.

Before he began painting, Lawrence spent months
researching the subject and distilling it into
short captions and preparatory drawings.
Then, with the help of his wife, the artist
Gwendolyn Knight, he prepared 60 boards for the
paintings.

He created the paintings in tempera, a type of
water-base paint that dries rapidly. To keep the
colors consistent, he applied one hue at a time
to every painting where it was to appear, a feat
of organization that required him to plan all 60
paintings in detail.

43
Panel no. 24

Lawrence, intent on constructing a seamless
narrative, chose to work with a single hue at a
time on all sixty panels.
He used drawings only as a guide, painted with
colors straight from the jar, and enlivened his
compositions with vigorous brushstrokes that help
further the movement of the story.

The captions placed below each image are composed
in a matter-of-fact tone
They were written first and are an integral part
of the work, not simply an explanation of the
image.

Lawrence often described the migration as people
on the move, and his series begins and ends with
crowds of people at a train station (a potent
symbol for growth and change in American history)

In the first panel, people stream away from the
viewer through gates labeled Chicago, New
York, and St. Louis

49
Panel no. 1

In the last one, they face us, still and silent,
behind an empty track.
The caption, which states, And the migrants kept
coming, renders the message sent by the painting
ambiguous and evocative.
Are the migrants leaving us, or have they just
arrived?
What is our relationship to them?

51
Panel no. 60

52
Panel no. 59

Lawrence also asks those questions of the
laundress, who appears toward the end of the
series.
Her monumental, semipyramidal form, anchored
between the brown vat containing a swirling
pattern of orange, green, yellow, and black items
and the overlapping rectangles of her completed
work, is thrust toward us by her brilliant white
smock.

Jacob Lawrence did not need to look far to find a
heroic African American woman for this image of a
solitary black laundress
His mother had spent long hours cleaning homes to
support her children.

55
Panel no. 57

With head bent in physical and mental
concentration, she wields an orange dolly, or
washing stick, in a precise vertical
A powerful stabilizing force in the painting, and
a visual metaphor for her strength and
determination.

Lawrence showed The Migration Series in Harlem
before being invited to bring it to a downtown
setting that had previously displayed only the
work of white artists.

The exhibition received rave reviews and
Lawrences acceptance by the art world and the
public was confirmed when twenty-six of the
panels were reproduced in Fortune magazine.

After they were published in part in Fortune
magazine, the series was the subject of a solo
show at the Downtown Gallery in Manhattan in
1941, making Lawrence the first black artist
represented by a New York gallery.
Interest in the series was intense.

Lawrence had intended the series to remain
intact, but agreed to divide it between two
museums,
The even numbers going to the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City, and the odd numbers to the
Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C

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The crucial thing about Lawrence's "Migration" is
how it is so completely centered on its subject
matter.
The series was made in the great age of modernist
style, whose consuming interest was in how a
picture looked.
Yet Lawrence's art is consumed with the story it
wants to tell.

64
Panel no. 5

65
Panel no. 10

We see Southern troubles the boll weevil that
destroyed the cotton crop, the lynchings, the
unfair courts and oppressive labor practices, the
poverty.

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68

We see the moment of migration
The black newspapers and Northern labor scouts
encouraging migrants to move
The efforts of the Southern establishment to keep
them from leaving
The crowded trains that carry them away.

69
Panel no. 49

70
Panel no. 20

And we see the benefits and trials of their new
Northern homes
Jobs and better food and less overt persecution
Ghettos and race riots and attacks on black
buildings.

It's clear that Lawrence's commitment to
communicating these facts, as powerfully as
possible, is greater than his interest in
pretty-picture making.

Lawrence doesn't simply ignore the radical
changes that had hit painting over the previous
four decades.
He couldn't work in any of the old realist
techniques, because those were too closely tied
with the bad old days they were born in.

To be of their time, and to look forward with
some semblance of hope, Lawrence's "Migration"
paintings had to work in a timely, modern style
that was widely seen as speaking to the future.

But somehow, as a black man treating the outsider
status of his race, his use of that vanguard
style also had to register some opposition to it,
as the product of oppressive white society.

That opposition is especially clear in the casual
crafting of the "Migration" series.
Almost all of Lawrence's forms and figures are
stylized, as modern art demanded.
But rather than sleek outlines and geometric
elegance, they have sloppy contours and crude
shapes.

His broad areas of color have gaps and
hesitations, as though filled in with magic
markers by a slightly lazy kid.
Lawrence avoids the fine surface polish often
sought in the fine arts and goes instead for
striking pictorial effects achieved with minimum
labor.

It's as though he recognizes a fully modern style
as the only language he can credibly speak in but
wants to insist that it's the message, rather
than the language, that really matters to him.

By making his images unsatisfactory, in terms of
the highest standards of refined modern art,
Lawrence says he's got different aims than such
pioneers as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, or
American followers such as Stuart Davis and
Charles Sheeler.

There's never anything high-flown or needlessly
complex in Lawrence's "Migration of the Negro,"
No allegory or coy symbolism or arcane
references.
It's meant to have the storytelling power of a
Passion cycle on the walls of a medieval church.

Instead, storytelling images work because of the
effort it takes to decipher them -- to match them
to the stories that you know, or to contemplate
what unknown stories they might illustrate.
And they work because that effort gets you
looking that much closer and thinking that much
harder about the situations depicted in them.

Lawrence's series, with its charged issues,
appropriately demands a bit more effort even than
usual.
What precisely is the subject of the
almost-abstract picture in Panel No. 7, captioned
"The Negro, who had been part of the soil for
many years, was now going into and living a new
life in the urban centers"? (At least, that's its
original caption. In the 1990s, Lawrence provided
updated captions for most of the series.)

84
Panel no. 7
85
Panel no. 10

Or how about Panel 19, captioned "There had
always been discrimination"?
It takes a minute to make out the double drinking
fountains, with a white woman at one and a black
mother and daughter at the other.

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88
Panel no. 17
89
Panel no. 18

90
Panel no. 30

91
Panel no. 21 The Seamstress

92
Panel no. 21 The Barber Shop

93
Panel no. 39

94
Panel no. 53

Lawrence retains just enough of modernism's
disjunctions -- of the broken spaces and forms of
cubism and futurism -- to stand for the painfully
fractured world he's depicting, and to
concentrate our minds on it. But there's never so
much modernism that its style distracts from his
subject.

Lawrence retired in 1986 as a professor art at
University of Washington in Seattle.
He received more than two dozen honorary degrees
in his lifetime and several awards for his
artwork and community service, including the
Springarn Medal in 1971the highest award given
by the N.A.A.C.P.