Jacob Lawrence, American art black master

NEW YORK, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- Jacob Lawrence, a black artist who was a success story in the white world, once said he documented the African-American struggle for freedom and social justice as part of "the larger struggle of man always to better his conditions and move forward."

This made Lawrence (1917-2000) a painter of universal interest, one of the finest talents black or white that America ever produced with a career spanning seven decades of social change in which his art played a crucial role.

The largest exposition ever of his work at the Whitney Museum, titled "Over the Line," is a fitting memorial for the prolific artist best known for his multi-panel narratives conceived as single, continuous works.

The show of 200 of his best works in gouache, tempera and watercolor originated at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which began purchasing Lawrence's art in 1941, starting with about half of his 60-picture "The Migration of the Negro." New York's Museum of Modern Art bought the other half.

This series, unparalleled in American art, has been reunited for the first time at the Whitney, and is the traveling retrospective's chief attraction. After closing at the Whitney Feb. 3, the show will move on to the Detroit Institute of Fine Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Born in Atlantic City, N. J., and bred in Pennsylvania and New York's Harlem, he was a member of a family that was a part of the great post-Civil War migration to the North from the South. He was of the first generation of blacks to receive art instruction in their own communities, in his case Harlem's Utopia Children's House and the WPA Harlem Art Workshop.

Under the tutelage of Charles Alston, he developed an easily recognizable style that reduces figures to flat shapes and the to pure, unmixed hues and employs unusual angles of vision and exaggerated perspective. He depicted dramatic episodes simply, without anger or sentimentality. Figures are defined by readily understood gesture, never by individual personalization.

Author Toni Morrison has described the emotional effect of Lawrence's work in a tribute in which she said he "seized beauty, manhandled it and made us know it too."

"No romance leaps from his canvases to seduce us," she said. "No easy sentiment drips from his brush. The brilliance, the precision of his work are clear, up-front assertive, brooking no debate, making no pleas."

Early works on exhibit, some of them pencil studies dating to the 1930s, are vibrant Harlem street scenes such as "The Butcher Shop," "Ice Peddlers," "Blind Beggar" and "Street Orator." There is a bordello scene showing white customers and children peeking in at the windows, scenes in a free clinic, and a picture of a family fleeing down a fire escape with its luggage to avoid eviction.

By 1940 Lawrence was at work on his "Migration" series of panels with narrative captions. They document the 1916-1930 movement North of more than a million blacks who sought to escape unemployment due to floods and boll weevil infestations that ruined Southern crops, as well as Jim Crow discrimination. The series was first exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in New York on Pearl Harbor Day and later featured in Fortune magazine.

"Migration" catapulted Lawrence to stardom at 23, the most prominent black artist in the nation, but he had enlisted in the Navy as a steward's mate, serving meals to white officers until he was transferred to the first integrated Navy ship, the USS Sea Cloud, a weather patrol vessel. Lawrence was commissioned to do 40 paintings of Coast Guard life, but all were lost in a military storage accident.

However, a 1946 Guggenheim fellowship enabled Lawrence to recapitulate his war experiences in a 14-panel series including a highly dramatic depiction of black and white soldiers coming ashore in enemy territory titled "Beachhead." Another outstanding work in this series, "Victory," shows an exhausted soldier resting on his rifle.

After experimenting with abstraction and odd subject matter, such as studies of a tie rack with multicolored ties, a marionette theater, and a game of dominoes in the early 1950s, Lawrence returned to historical subjects. Some of the paintings from his "History of the American People" series -- the Boston Massacre and the Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton duel -- are on display.

In the 1960s Lawrence became a member of the faculty at the Pratt Institute art school in Brooklyn, began to depict the civil rights conflicts of the era, and experimented with living in Africa. An eight month's stay in Lagos, Nigeria, before returning to the United States to take a teaching job at the University of Washington, Seattle, resulted in a fresher, livelier style that can be seen his 20-painting series on the life of Harriet Tubman.

The Tubman pictures are illustration for a children's book about the black Abolitionist and are full of imagery designed to catch the eye of children such as pigs, rabbits, butterflies, chickens and cats in delightfully animated renderings. Windmill Books, the publisher, used all of Lawrence's illustrations but one, a depiction of Tubman trudging to Canada on the Underground Railroad route, staining the snow with blood from her feet. Windmill's editors considered it too realistic for a child's book.

From the 1970s onward, Lawrence's art became more philosophical and symbolic. After the Rev. Martin Luther King's assassination, he did a series titled "The Builder" which emphasized blacks and whites working together. This was a theme he pursued to the end of his life, resulting in some very fine paintings, notably "The Carpenters," a forceful composition in primal blue, red, and yellow.

The show includes illustrations by Lawrence for John Hersey's 1982 book, "Hiroshima," that make a universal statement of man's inhumanity to man by picturing zombie-like human beings with skulls for faces. In 1989 he illustrated "Eight Studies for the Book of Genesis" published by the Limited Editions Club in which he depicts God as a bearded high priest going about the work of creation while a congregation looks on.

This work is like a benediction to an exhibition that has more to say about life, travail, tragedy, hope, and regeneration than half a dozen shows by lesser artists could be expected to convey. If the show had included Lawrence's early series devoted to Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian freedom fighter, and Frederick Douglas, it would have been even stronger. As it is, it is a blockbuster in every sense of the word.

Lawrence's last public work, the design for an enormous Venetian glass mosaic mural titled "New York in Transit," has recently been installed in the Times Square subway station. It is a semi-abstract work in rich color showing passengers and vignettes of city life as seen from the windows on an elevated line. He completed the mural design for the Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1997, three years before his death.