Lawrence, Jacob

LAWRENCE, JACOB (1917-2000). One of the most acclaimed African American artists of the twentieth century, Jacob Armstead Lawrence was one of the few African Americans to be regularly included in conventional American art history textbooks. His most famous works were epic narratives of African American history and key figures of Black struggles for liberation, freedom, and dignity. His works throughout his career reflected the same progressive focus characteristic of the mainstream tradition of Black art from the nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century.

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lawrence moved to Harlem as a young teenager. Always an artist, he began studying with African American iconic artists Charles Alston and August Savage, and he soon revealed his strong visual talent while training at the famed Harlem Art Workshop. But it was Harlem itself –– its Black cultural vibrancy –– that became the incubator of his lifetime thematic focus. During the Great Depression, he obtained a paid position with the New Deal Works Progress Administration.

His first major series of forty-one paintings from 1937 involved Haitian slave rebellion leader Toussaint L’Ouverture. This famous series was the hallmark of his career as the key historian of the Black experience through paintings and prints. Like those that followed, the Toussaint paintings reflect a strongly militant spirit.

In 1938-1939, Lawrence produced a series of paintings on Harriet Tubman and in 1939-1940 an equally powerful series on Frederick Douglass. These sequences present the dramatic lives of two slaves who escaped and became major leaders in the continuing Black struggle. Lawrence’s paintings offer a compelling view of American history through art.

Jacob Lawrence completed his best-known series, “The Migration Series,” in 1940-1941. It chronicles the journey of thousands of African Americans moving from the South to the urban North after World War I. It features Black struggles, hardships, racial hostility and white violence, and resilience. The series brought him national prominence. He also painted a series on radical abolitionist John Brown in 1941-1942, revealing his strongly favorable view of a man regularly dismissed as a crazy fanatic in mainstream white textbooks and media. In 1941. Lawrence married painter Gwendolyn Knight, who often worked with him.

In 1943, Lawrence entered the U.S. Coast Guard, where he continued to paint. After World War II, he fell into a depression and was hospitalized for nearly a year. He was always open about his illness and even produced a hospital series about his experiences.

In the 1950s, Lawrence painted a lesser-known series “Struggle: From the History of the American People.” It is a radical history, a counternarrative, featuring an expansive view of Blacks, women, Native Americans, and even a critical allusion to the evils of Senator Joseph McCarthy at the time of his infamous hearings. This series highlights marginalized people in America, a powerful feature of Lawrence’s overall artistic vision.

Jacob Lawrence was also a teacher during his long, distinguished life, finishing as a professor of art at the University of Washington. He remained in Seattle until his death. In the latter part of his career, he created several striking paintings and prints dealing with the civil rights movement and other features of the Black experience. All had a powerful political orientation. In 1983, he produced a print series based on John Hersey’s Hiroshima, where he captured the emotional and physical destruction and shock of the 1945 US atomic bombing of that Japanese city. It demonstrated the breadth of Lawrence’s humanistic and political vision.

Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death. He was a passionate chronicler of Black life and history and one of the most outstanding socially-conscious American artists of the modern era. Broadly recognized for his contributions, Lawrence was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 1990, and given nearly twenty honorary degrees.

Nesbitt, Peter T. and Michelle DuBose. Jacob Lawrence: Paintings. Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999): A Catalogue Raisonné. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.

Turner, Elizabeth Hutton. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series. Urbanna, Virginia:The Rappahannock Press, 1993.

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

Wheat, Ellen Harkins. Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Douglas Series of 1938-40. Hampton, Virginia: Hampton University Museum and University of Washington Press, 1991.

Website: The Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence Virtual Resource Center. https://web.archive.org/web/20080516195626/http://www.jacobandgwenlawrence.org/