Ground-Breaking Art
July 2001
In Ken Burns’ documentary, "Jazz," much is made of the fact that Louis Armstrong’s early stint in reform school—where he picked up a trumpet for the first time—changed not only the legendary musician’s life but the very pulse of American popular music. Arguably, Jacob Lawrence’s enrollment in a Harlem after-school program in arts and crafts at age 13 in 1930 also was a pivotal cultural event. For what the trumpet was to Armstrong, the paint brush was to Lawrence: the instrument by which he communicated the joys, struggles and triumphs of a people and of the country they helped to build. That narrative, in all its rhythms and riffs, is told in a major retrospective of Lawrence’s work organized by Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection, where it will be on view through August 19th before traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (November 8–February 3, 2002), the Detroit Institute of Arts (February 23–May 19, 2002), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 16–September 8, 2002) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (October 6, 2002–January 5, 2003). "Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence" features more than 200 paintings and drawings of the first African-American artist to win mainstream acceptance. In 1942, he became the first African-American to exhibit at a major New York commercial gallery: the Edith Halpert Gallery in New York City. The Phillips was planned on the occasion of last fall’s publication of The Complete Jacob Lawrence, a two-volume catalog raisonne that, like the exhibition, traces the evolution of Lawrence’s maverick vision expressed in works teeming with life—workers, musicians, still-lifes, self-portraits, historical figures—a prodigious output that ended only with his death last year at age 82.
"I hope that people coming to the show will get an understanding of Lawrence’s fluid and flexible invention," says Elizabeth Hutton Turner, senior curator at Phillips and organizer of the exhibition. "He transposed and translated elements from theater, music, jazz and poetry. Through simplification and selection, elimination and emphasis, Lawrence used abstract styles to their maximum advantage. If you think about how he narrows his range of color, selects a series of flat color patterns of tempera, it comes as close as the visual arts can come to language."
Lawrence never was locked into the social realism with which he grew up—in part due to his exposure to the Bauhaus concept and vision of his mentor, Josef Albers, who recruited him to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. But he also never once succumbed to the dictatorial trends of the art world. His work was a synthesis of abstraction and an autobiographical message through which he was able to evaluate himself, his community and his environment. The Phillips exhibition fully traces that singular and lively journey through his 20th-century output. Since it coincided with the African-American community’s growing consciousness to become empowered and create its own identity, Lawrence clearly saw his role in expressing those aspirations, having basked in the creative glow of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s.
The beauty of that struggle, which was Lawrence’s own self-declared leitmotif, first was explored dramatically—and cinematically—in his famous "The Migration of the Negro," the 60 panels on hardboard detailing the Black diaspora from the South to the North, which paralleled his own family’s experience. It was this 1940–41 body of work, in fact, which was split evenly between the Museum of Modern Art and collector Duncan Phillips, and which again will be united for this exhibition.
"What Lawrence wanted to do first and foremost was to communicate," says Turner, and throughout his life he would experiment with how best to get his personal message across with power and clarity, not only to the African-American community but also to the world at large.
The stories Lawrence tells in his works range from the upturned expectant faces in "The Street Orator’s Audience," 1936, waiting to receive the message from a speaker whose legs are only visible as he climbs the podium, to "The Builders in the City," 1993, the series on construction workers that Lawrence worked on during the ’80s and ’90s, following his move from Harlem to Seattle. In between, Lawrence weaves an authentic American tapestry of color and feeling: the celebration of menial labor in paintings like "The Ironers," 1943, with its cosmic brew of color and magical form; the psychological complexity of "Vaudeville," 1951, a densely patterned work that explores the debilitating cost of performing in blackface; and the quiet social protest of "Praying Ministers," 1962, which exemplifies the "beautiful struggle" of the Civil Rights Movement while never ignoring its brutality.
"In these paintings, you have the face of the community, the gesture of the performer, the psychology of the game and the dignity and strength of work," Turner says. "Underlying it all is the idea of builders, almost as if Lawrence came to the realization that what he’s doing by communicating and connecting with his audience, he is building something. And that something’s not finished. But he’s got a part of it, a rhythm, a harmony, a purpose. There’s a wonderful integrity from beginning to end."