Jacob LAWRENCE
1917–2000, USA
Jacob Armstead Lawrence came of age in Harlem during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, Lawrence received early artistic training under Charles Alston at the Utopia Children’s Center in Harlem, the Harlem Art Workshop and 306 West 141st Street. Alston and Augusta Savage both encouraged Lawrence in his studies, helping him secure scholarships for art classes and steady employment as an easel painter for the WPA (1938-40). Inspired by the formal properties of African art, the history of African Americans in the United States, and everyday life in Harlem, Lawrence developed a distinctive style of narrative painting featuring a flattened picture plane and boldly colored figures. From 1937 to 1938, Lawrence created his first narrative suite, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, consisting of forty-one paintings about the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). He went on to create a total of nine series, including ones based on the lives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, but his most celebrated was The Migration of the Negro (later renamed The Migration Series), completed in 1941 and purchased by the Phillips Collection (which owns the odd-numbered panels) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (which has the even-numbered ones). Lawrence joined the roster of artists at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, a leading gallery specializing in American art, and he gained widespread recognition in 1944 when MoMA organized a traveling exhibition of the Migration works. The theme of migration continued to be an important subject for Lawrence, but he also represented African Americans at work and play, at home and abroad. In 2000, the same year that Lawrence died in his longtime home of Seattle, Washington, a two-volume catalogue raisonné of his work was published. Shortly after Lawrence’s death, the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation was established to serve as an educational resource on the art of Lawrence and his wife, artist Gwendolyn Knight. In 2001, Lawrence was the subject of the traveling exhibition, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, organized by The Phillips Collection.