Lawrence's Migration Series example essay topic

One the most distinguished artists of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City and sent part of his child hood in Pennsylvania. After his parents split up in 1924, he went with his mother and siblings to New York, settling in Harlem. 'He trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the New York Public Library's 113 5th Street branch. Younger than the artists and writers who took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's, Lawrence was also at an angle to them: he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks - the Noble Negroes in Art Deco guise - that tended to be produced as an antidote to the toxic racist stereotypes with which white popular culture had flooded America since Reconstruction. Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu - in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard-trained esthete (and America's first black Rhodes scholar) who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks, which could speak explicitly to African-Americans and still embody the values, and self-critical powers, of modernism. Or, in Locke's own words, 'There is in truly great art no essential conflict between racial or national traits and universal human values.

' This would not sit well with today's American cultural separatists who trumpet about the incompatibility of American experiences - 'It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand' - but it was vital to Lawrence's own growth as an artist. Locke perceived the importance of the Great Migration, not just as an economic event but as a cultural one, in which countless blacks took over the control of their own lives, which had been denied them in the South: When years later he told an interviewer that 'I am the black community,' he was neither boasting nor kidding. He had none of the alienation from Harlem that was felt by some other black artists of the 1930's, like the expatriate William Johnson. Jacob Lawrence is celebrated for his insightful depictions of American and, in particular, African American life. Best known for his epic series of paintings on such subjects as the lives of Harriet Tubman and Toussaint L'Ouverture, he has also created numerous prints, murals, and drawings.

Among the latter are a delightful set of twenty-three illustrations for the classic Aesop's Fables. These bold and expressive pen-and-ink drawings are on view at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, from April 10 through June 20, 1999 in an exhibition entitled Jacob Lawrence -- Aesop's Fables. This is the only northeastern venue for this nationally touring exhibition. Above left: Jacob Lawrence in his studio, 1994.

Photo by Spike M afford, courtesy of the artist and Francine Seders Gallery Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lawrence moved to New York City with his family in 1930, not long after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. There he studied with painter Charles Alston, whose studio was a gathering place for many of the great African American artists and intellectuals of that era. Inspired by the discussions he encountered at Alston's studio, Lawrence developed the keen interest in African American history and culture that has informed much of his artistic work. Right: Aesop's Fable, 'The Two Frogs,' 1969, courtesy of the artist and Francine Seders Gallery Lawrence is best known for his epic series that grew out of this influential time.

Comprising as many as sixty paintings each, these series depict such subjects as the successful Haitian slave revolt led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Harriet Tubman's work in the Underground Railroad, the life of Abolitionist writer and orator Frederick Douglass, and the Great Migration of African Americans from southern farms to northern cities. Completed in 1941, the Migration series catapulted the twenty-four-year-old artist to national prominence. The series was shown at New York's Downtown Gallery and subsequently was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection, making Lawrence both the first African American artist to be represented by a major New York gallery and the first to be represented in MoMA's collection. His work has since earned a place in the collections of nearly every major American museum -- including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art -- and has been the subject of three major nationally touring retrospectives. Among Lawrence's numerous honors and awards are twenty honorary doctorates from institutions including Harvard University, Yale University, New York University, Howard University, and Amherst College.

He received the National Medal of Arts from President Bush in 1990 and he is a member of both the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Stylistically, Lawrence is known for his felicitous marriage of a compositional language based on cubism and a flair for draftsmanship and characterization. A master storyteller, Lawrence possesses an engaging gift for narrative that is particularly evident in the Fables illustrations. Deftly capturing the fables' charm, humor, and wisdom, Lawrence's works reflect both the whimsy and the severity of these timeless morality tales that have fascinated him from his youth.

Interestingly, although intrigued by the use of animals as main characters, Lawrence first sketched the scenarios with human figures, replacing them only later with their anthropomorphized forms. These figures are rendered with a rich, dynamic tension and vitality emphasized by the high contrast black and white color scheme. Left: Aesop's Fable, 'The Council of Mice,' 1969, courtesy of the artist and Francine Seders Gallery Jacob Lawrence -- Aesop's Fables presents a rare opportunity to see one of Lawrence's series in its entirety. With their combination of sophisticated technique and whimsical subject matter, these images hold considerable appeal for adults and children alike. Jacob Lawrence -- Aesop's Fables was first published by Windmill Books / Simon and Schuster in 1970. In 1997 the University of Washington Press issued a new edition that includes five works omitted from the original.

This exhibition was organized by Francine Seders Gallery Ltd., Seattle, Washington. Its presentation at the Hood Museum of Art has been made possible through the generous support of the William Chase Grant 1919 Memorial Fund. &nbs p; With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro migrant becomes more and more like that of the European waves at their crests, a mass movement towards the larger and more democratic chance-in the Negro's case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from mediaeval America to modern. ' To narrate it, then, would require a modern language, a deep immersion in the experience, and an awareness of the harsh toll that contact with American modernity exacted on the blacks. From childhood, Lawrence had been steeped in family and community stories of the Migration, and when - encouraged by Locke - he decided to paint it, he worked hard to get the historical background right. Months of painstaking research in the Sc homburg Collection of the Public Library, New York's chief archive on African-American life and history, followed - even though the finished paintings rarely allude to specific historical events. He took on the task with a youthful earnestness that remains one of the most touching aspects of the final work, and goes beyond mere self- expression.

As a result, you sense that something is speaking through Lawrence - a collectivity. 'The series is notable for the language it does not use. Lawrence was not a propagandist. He eschewed the caricatural apparatus of Popular Front Social Realism, then at its high tide in America. Considering the violence and pathos of so much of his subject matter - prisons, deserted villages, city slums, race riots, labor camps - his images are restrained, and all the more piercing for their lack of bombast. When he painted a lynching, for instance, he left out the dangling body and the jeering crowd: there is only bare earth, a branch, an empty noose, and the huddled lump of a grieving woman.

He set aside the influence of Rivera and the Mexican muralists, which lay so heavily on other artists; he wasn't painting murals, but images closer in size to single pages, no more than eighteen inches by twelve. Nevertheless, he imagined the paintings as integrally connected - a single work of art, no less unified than a mural, but portable. Migration is a visual ballad, each image a stanza-compressed, like the blues, to the minimum needs of narration. Number 10, Lawrence's Migration Series made him nationally famous when it was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune Magazine.

The series depicts the great move north of blacks in the Depression years. ' They were very poor', pares the elements of a black sharecropper's life down to the least common denominator: a man and a woman staring at empty bowls on a bare brown plane, an empty basket hung on the wall by an enormous nail - the sort of nail you imagine in a crucifixion. There isn't a trace of the sentimentality that coats Picasso's Blue Period, or the work of most American Social Realists. 'Lawrence called his style 'dynamic cubism,' though it wasn't notably dynamic, except when he used flame like forms and pushy oppositions of structure; generally the paintings tend to an Egyptian stillness, frieze like even when you know the subject was moving.

His debts to Cubism and to Matisse are obvious: the flat, sharp overlaps of form, the reliance on silhouette, and a high degree of abstraction in the color. But there is something more demotic behind those colors. They came, as Lawrence acknowledged, more from his experience in Harlem than from other art: In order to add something to their lives, [black families] decorated their tenements and their homes in all of these colors. I've been asked, is anyone in my family artistically inclined? I've always felt ashamed of my response and I always said no, not realizing that my artistic sensibility came from this ambiance...

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. ' The memory of them is plain in Number 57, 'The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South', with its single figure of a laundress in a white smock, stirring a vat of fabrics - blue, black, yellow, pink - with her pole: a dense and well-locked composition, suggesting the permanence and resistance which is one of the underlying themes of Lawrence's series. '.