A promising young artist

"The place of Jacob Lawrence among younger painters is unique. Having thus far miraculously escaped the imprint of academic ideas and current vogues in art, to which young artists are most susceptible, he has followed a course of development dictated entirely by his own inner motivations." "Any evaluation of his work to date is most difficult, a comparison impossible. Working in the very limited medium of flat tempera he achieved a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable and exciting." "He is particularly sensitive to the life about him; the joy, the suffering, the weakness, the strength of the people he sees every day. This for the most part forms the subject matter of his interesting compositions." "Still a very young painter, Lawrence symbolizes more than any one I know, the vitality, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially conscious generation of Negro artists."

Written by Charles H. Alston, Jacob Lawrence's first teacher, to introduce Lawrence's first one-man exhibition, sponsored by the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild, at the 135th Street YMCA in 1938.

An Extraordinary Career

Like many other creative individuals, Jacob Lawrence's early experiences influenced and shaped his later views of life. "Just walking around and thinking" is one of Lawrence's strongest memories of his childhood, and possibly one of the first signs of the introspective nature that is reflected in his work. "For me, art became very important at an early age. I was able to immerse myself in a personal kind of expression. I learned early that experiences with family and friends have a lot to do with the way you view the world, and can greatly affect and shape the course of your life." The course of his life is indeed what his art documents.

The eldest of three children, Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on 7 September 1917. His parents migrated from the South, as did so many other Blacks who were in search of a better way of life for themselves and their children. It was not until the early 1940s that Jacob Lawrence had an opportunity to visit the South to continue research for one of his major themes and best-known works completed in 1941, the "Migration" series.

After his parents moved to eastern Pennsylvania and their marriage was dissolved, his mother was forced by financial hardship to place her three children in foster care. Memories of the wooded area near his foster family's home in Pennsylvania are still vivid. Lawrence spent many hours wandering through the brush and forest-like areas near his temporary home in Pennsylvania. Just a few years later, he witnessed the sharp contrast between that semi-rural environment and his new home in Harlem, New York, when his mother was joyfully reunited with her children. It was Harlem after the stock market crash of 1929. The heady days of the "New Negro" and the "Harlem Renaissance" had come to a close.

The community of concrete and steel—teeming, crowded, and noisy—must have seemed strange to young Lawrence. In Pennsylvania, there had been space in which to roam. In Harlem, there were only the crowded avenues and alleys in which to play. His mother thoughtfully directed her children's energies away from the cruel street, however. She enrolled them in Utopia House, a community center in Harlem which provided a hot lunch and after-school arts-and-crafts activities.

This was Lawrence's first contact with art and artists. He recalls spending several years at Utopia House, from 1930. It was the painting class that interested him most. Young Lawrence worked in a studio headed by Charles Alston, who was then a student at Columbia University. "Alston was the first person with whom I came in contact who was working toward becoming a professional artist. I must say, he did encourage me and allow me to work at my own pace and according to my own tendencies." Alston, Lawrence's first teacher, was eventually moved to observe, "It would be a mistake to try and teach Jake. He was teaching himself, I mean in his own way. All he needed was encouragement and technical information."

In addition to his experience as a student in the workshop of Charles Alston, young Lawrence worked with Henry Bannarn, a painter and sculptor from Oklahoma. Henry (Mike) Bannarn had moved to New York in 1934, after completing studies at the Minnesota School of Art. "He acquired a studio that served as a meeting place for artists, " Lawrence noted. "I rented space from Mike and learned a great deal just being around him. He had a lot of experience. Having gone through a regular formal art education program in Minnesota, Bannarn knew about printmaking, sculpture, and various other media."

Both Alston and Bannarn were trained in the tradition of Western aesthetics, as Lawrence was well aware. "Their formal training was the result of attending art schools where traditional drawing techniques, based on the use of light and shadow, were emphasized. Because I did not have a formal art background, none of this affected me. Fortunately for me, the tendency at this time, outside of the schools, was to ignore such training and to concentrate on expressionistic tendencies. This was all in my favor. The climate was right for me because I came along in the 1930s, when there was a great appeal and support for what I was doing."

Milton Brown, in his text for Lawrence's Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective Exhibition, wrote of Lawrence in 1974: "It is certainly of more than passing interest that his work shows no influence from any of his teachers. He has said that he was inspired by (Pieter) Bruegel, Kathe Kollwitz, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and especially Jose Clemente Orozco, who then loomed so large in the American art world, and, surprisingly, Arthur Dove."

Under the guidance of Alston and Bannarn, and with the encouragement of sculptor Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence began to come into his own as an artist. More and more, his art reflected the everyday experiences of the sights and sounds of Harlem.

In Elton Fax's book, Seventeen Black Artists, Lawrence recalls his fledgling efforts:

My first painting consisted of geometric designs, done from my imagination with poster paints on paper. I was playing with forms and color with no other thing in mind. Then I began painting masks out of my imagination. It was only later that I began working out of my own experience. I built street scenes out of corrugated boxes, taking them to familiar spots in the street and painting houses and scenes on them, recreating as best I could a three-dimensional image of those spots. And then I began to gradually work freely on paper and with poster color. I have always been involved in defining shapes and space. The mood that I am in can determine the type of space I use and what emerges.

Jacob Lawrence became aware of color in the initial stages of his development. In his first painting efforts, he worked on ideas inspired by a second-hand Persian rug in his mother's home:

My mother decorated her house with colors; we were surrounded by them. In Harlem, this was common for people in our economic and social level. I can't say that it was common throughout the Harlem community—there were families in Harlem that were very affluent. I didn't know those people. I only knew people on our economic and social level, poor people. And like other poor people in Harlem, we used a lot of color to decorate our houses. We had a lot of decorations, including paper flowers and things like that. This was a part of my cultural experience, so it was reflected in my paintings.

In 1937, Lawrence received a scholarship to the American Artists School, where he studies with Sol Wilson, Eugene Moreley, and Anton Refregier from two years. During this time, he was nearing the completion of his Toussaint l'Ouverture series (1937-38), the first of several history narratives that highlight his career.

When he first exhibited in 1938, it was clear that Lawrence was no 'primitive'; he had as much training as one would expect a young man of his age to have, and yet his art appeared pure, naïve, original, uncontaminated by the mannerisms of the time, except that as a social art it was precisely of its time. He was a new voice with its own pitch and distinct Black resonance. His subject was Harlem, which he saw freshly, not only with an observant reporter's eye but also as a native son, with empathy and a mordant folk wit. He recorded the demeaning details of slum life as well as the raucous vitality of the Harlem streets.

Psychically, Jacob Lawrence has never left the environment of his youth. The words "environment" and "community" recur frequently in conversations with him, especially when questions relating to the inspiration and support for his work are raised.

The 1930s were Jacob Lawrence's formative years as an artist, and, although framed by a worldwide economic depression, this decade marked a fruitful period for artists as a whole in the United States. For the first time in U.S. history, artists' work was regarded as gainful employment and rewarded with weekly paychecks from the federal programs of the New Deal. Pioneering artists in the popular culture of that period reached out to Lawrence and shared their experiences in what was referred to as the "era of the New" in the 1920s:

Women's suffrage had produced a "new woman." Jazz was the new music. Henry Ford produced a new automobile for the working class. And there was a "New Negro"-a term which included hundreds of thousands of Blacks who had migrated to the North between 1900 and 1920, fleeing economic hardship and brutal racism in search of human dignity and economic opportunity. It also included veterans of color who had fought in the war "to make the world safe for democracy" and who were determined to make democracy work at home.

Out of this mass migration, urbanization, and participation in the war, evolved a dynamic artistic community where music, literature, theatre, dance, and the visual arts blossomed. The aura of this 1920s phenomenon permeated the Harlem community, of which Jacob Lawrence became a member in 1930.

Augusta Savage, Lawrence's acknowledged mentor, was instrumental in assisting many Blacks with enrollment in the art project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal program of the New Deal. It was Savage's confidence in Lawrence, coupled with her persistence, that led to his first opportunity to earn a living professionally as an artist through the WPA project.

By this time, Lawrence had already gained recognition as a significant artist with the inclusion of his Toussaint l'Ouverture series in an exhibition of Black artists co-sponsored by the Harmon Foundation and the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art in 1939, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. Motivated by a keen interest in Black history, Lawrence produces, in the following years, biographical series on heroes of the slave era-Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown.

Long known for his unique serial paintings that depict the history and struggles of African Americans, Lawrence has conducted his own private revolution for social change and justice. His works serve as documents of cultural archetypes and validate the everyday experiences of both urban and country dwellers. He has steadfastly dedicated his life and art to the cause of human dignity, and he has enhanced the lives of others by broadening their perception of beauty and culture.

Key to the art of Jacob Lawrence is the timeless value of the ideas that he chooses to express. His concerns are those of peoples throughout the world, regardless of cultural origins or economic level. Migration, struggle for freedom, joy, happiness, and fear are by a few of the matters that have engaged his attention.

In addition to his message, the importance of Lawrence's work is found in his ability to abstract and project the essence of ideas with honesty and effectiveness. His work, since its first public showing, has been a progression of development. He has not fluctuated from one stylistic tendency to another. This solidity may be the result of his heightened vision and an extraordinary ability to encapsulate history-particularly Black history-in the manner of a visual historian. Using the series as his principal format, he weaves narratives through abstract and figurative forms that are combined to express his unique depictions of reality.

Thus, Jacob Lawrence's style grew naturally from the breadth of his own vision and the limitation of his chosen medium. The art of Jacob Lawrence is, in essence, Jacob Lawrence the person. Lawrence juxtaposes the intellectual and the emotional, the complex and the simple, the private and the public, to produce his architectonically structured and imposing compositions. His rugged drawing style is symbolic of the kinds of experiences he presents, and reinforces his commitment to social change.

History has taught Jacob Lawrence to view life in a broad perspective, while Jacob Lawrence has taught us the value of trusting our history and ourselves, and charting our own mainstream.