Friday, July 30, 2010

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Passing - Jacob Lawrence
Source: Unknown
Author: Unknown

On June 9 a giant passed away doing what he had done for the last 60-odd years. Jacob Armstead Lawrence, one of the leading American modernists, was in the midst of creating new paintings that continue to represent the "black familiar" when he died at his home in Seattle after a long illness. He was 82.

Lawrence possessed a brilliant mind, and though he always downplayed the trials and tribulations of race in his personal life, he was one of the most illustrious chroniclers of black American life in the 20th century. Like the blues, jazz, and hip hop, the art of Jacob Lawrence is quintessentially African American - a reflection of a new, syncretic identity produced by the Middle Passage. And like the blues, Lawrence's work depends equally on the subject of suffering as it does on spiritual rejuvenation.

"I can't think of another American artist of his generation whose works, even the ones that tell tragic stories, are at the same time so true, so modest and so filled with basic love," wrote chief art critic Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times recently.

"Most people love his work because of its originality and the way he injects his thematic into his style," said art historian Scott Baker, Assistant Director of the art gallery at Howard University. "His style is his very own and he never changed it to succeed, as some black artists did."

Baker also praised Lawrence -- who painted two murals, "Origins" and "Expressions," on the walls of Howard University's Blackburn Center -- for his ability to maintain his distinctive style even when he painted portraits. "For example, when he did the painting of Jesse Jackson on a 1967 cover of Time magazine, he did not compromise his style but he was still able to achieve likeness."

Lawrence was scheduled to have a new exhibition at his Manhattan gallery, D.C. Moore, this November. Now that show will be a retrospective presentation.

Lawrence was born on September 17, 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the eldest of three children. His father, a railroad cook, left the family in 1924. After a brief stint in foster homes, the children joined their mother in Philadelphia and soon moved to Harlem, where Lawrence experienced the Harlem Renaissance firsthand. His mother enrolled him in classes at the Utopia Children's Center, an arts and crafts settlement house where he met his first mentor, the artist Charles Alston. At 16, Lawrence dropped out of high school to work in a printing plant and began to take classes with Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop. To facilitate his art education, he regularly walked the 60-block distance between his home and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he took a particular interest in the work of Sassetta and other narrative painters of the early Italian Renaissance.

At Alston's studio, Lawrence met Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison and the artists Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, and, most importantly, Augusta Savage, who later helped him obtain his first W.P.A. Federal Art Project grant. By 1936, Lawrence, who was 19 at the time, had produced a significant group of paintings on Harlem street life. Like Johnson, Lawrence keenly used a satirical touch to find humor where others saw only bleak poverty. The Social Realist subject matter and his extremely refined geometric color configuration were already in place at that young age. It was the style for which he would become famous.
In 1937, Lawrence began work on his first major statement, the multipart narrative with which he would always be closely identified. The Toussaint L'Ouverture series, 60 small works done on paper in tempera—thereafter, his preferred medium—dramatized the struggle for independence in Haiti. The choice of Haiti was in line with Locke's writings on the New Negro, and also demonstrates Lawrence's interest in universal forms of poverty, struggle, and cultural rejuvenation. The series stole the show at a 1939 exhibition co-sponsored by the Harmon Foundation and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

In 1938, Lawrence completed a series of 32 paintings illustrating the life of Frederick Douglass, and immediately followed that with 31 paintings on the life of Harriet Tubman. In 1940, a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund allowed him to rent his first studio, the place where he completed his landmark series "The Migration of the American Negro," dramatizing the mass migration of Southern blacks to the North following World War I.

"I started working on the series in 1939 and completed it in 1941," Lawrence said of the collection of paintings. "In the Harlem community, as in many communities throughout the country, there was a great interest in Negro history. I guess this was during the Marcus Garvey period. We had teachers in the community and after school Negro history clubs. I became fascinated; I guess it was part of my search for an image. I would like to think that I was representing a c