November 5, 2020 29
Knives Out
Sanford Schwartz
Jacob Lawrence:
The American Struggle
an exhibition at the Peabody
Essex Museum, Salem,
Massachusetts, January 18 –
August 9, 2020; the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City,
August 29–November 1, 2020;
the Birmingham Museum of Art,
November 20, 2020–
February 7, 2021; the Seattle Art
Museum, February 25–May 23,
2021; and the Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C., June 26–
September 19, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Elizabeth Hutton Turner
and Austen Barron Bailly.
Peabody Essex Museum/
University of Washington Press,
188 pp., $45.00
As we were waiting on line at
the Metropolitan Museum to get
into the exhibition “Jacob Law-
rence: The American Struggle,”
I told my friend that one reason
why Lawrence, though long an
esteemed name in American art,
has a rather modest presence in
our museums may derive from his not
having made oil paintings. In a long
career that stretched from the late
1930s, when he was barely in his twen-
ties, through the late 1990s—he died in
2000, at eighty- two—he primarily used
gouache (which is sometimes referred
to as poster paint) or tempera.
These water- based paints can be used
on paper or on prepared boards—Law-
rence used both, but he more often
painted on paper—and while works in
tempera can get by without being glazed,
museums increasingly want them pro-
tected by glass. Works on paper are
always glazed and they are often mat-
ted, too, and the combination of glass
and mat can give Lawrence’s pictures a
slightly removed, retiring quality, despite
the fact that his characteristic subject
was the hum and bustle of urban exis-
tence, and his pictures are often full of
bright, unshaded yellows, greens,
reds, blues, purples, and oranges.
Even Lawrence’s best- known
work, the 1941 Migration Series, is,
due to its very structure, more heard
about than seen. Originally titled
The Migration of the Negro, the
monumental piece details the expe-
riences, moods, and sites that made
up the mass twentieth- century exo-
dus of African- Americans from the
rural South to cities in the North.
Lawrence’s genius was not only to
see that the vast story could be the
subject of a single artwork but to
tell it in a series of separate, self-
contained, highly varied small
panels. Any viewer taking in its
sixty pictures on the walls of a mu-
seum—pictures that might show
masses of people at a train station,
a girl reading in bed, or a corner of
an empty wood cabin with the blind
drawn—is automatically put on a
journey of her or his own to begin
with. It did not hurt the fame of the
work, which was instantaneous,
that its creator was a largely un-
known twenty- four- year- old who
had dropped out of high school and
had little formal art training.
Seeing the work in full, however,
takes a certain amount of waiting and
luck. Half of it is owned by the Phil-
lips Collection and half belongs to the
Museum of Modern Art, which to-
gether organized the last, and warmly
received, full exhibition in 2015.* Yet
when the many panels, which were done
in tempera, can be reassembled (in it-
self demanding a significant amount of
wall space), a small but potent element
in their favor stems from the way that
each has an appropriately plain, simple
wood frame, which comes close in tothe picture. There is little or no distanc-
ing mat, and surely this helps give the
pictures their telegraphic force.The pictures in the current Met show,
which are all also tempera on board,
form a series, too, and an aspect of
their strength comes from the way they
have been newly and uniformly placed
in crisp white frames that go right up
against the images. Sharp- edged and
pointy- cornered, they are beautifully
of a piece with works that to a large de-
gree feature sharp edges and pointed
forms—lethal ones, whether swords,
knives, rakes, exaggeratedly long mus-
kets, or fearsome bayonets. But in
pictures that recall the taut, angular
worlds of Cubism and Expressionism,
even objects that are not weapons—the
straps of soldiers’ uniforms, creases incloaks, or the feather headdresses
of Native Americans—feel as if
they have cutting edges.
Titled by Lawrence Struggle:
From the History of the American
People and worked on between
1954 and 1956, the twenty-four
small pictures on view present mo-
ments of many kinds of struggle.
(Of the original series, five more
have not been found, and one, due
to its fragile condition, could not
travel.) We see strife on shipboard,
in colonial assemblies, in street up-
risings, between particular persons,
or even in an empty, snowy land-
scape where elk have been killed
by trappers. The tenor of these
struggles is physical, literal, and vi-
olent. And yet the panels left this
viewer believing that Lawrence’s
sense of the American past is not
that of continual confrontation,
fury, and loss, nor that his tone is
condemnatory or even reproving.
He seems less outside these
moments, judging them from an
educated twentieth- century per-
spective, than a participant within
them. He appears too caught up
imaginatively in staging his sometimes
fevered or bleakly chilly and desolate
scenes to pronounce in favor of one
side or the other. For this writer, the
series is actually a joy and a revelation.
It presents a Jacob Lawrence we have
not known, a rash, sometimes not al-
together comprehensible artist who is
different from the somewhat benign
creator of pageantlike and often sweet-
tempered scenes of urban, and largely
African- American, life.
Not seen in its entirety since 1958,
the series will at the least be unfamiliar
to most viewers. And while the pictures
elicit a good deal of commentary in the
show’s ac company i ng catalog, my sense
is that, perhaps because they have not
had a complete viewing in so long, they
have not been sufficiently singled out
in the writing on Lawrence. He wanted
his story to begin with the run- up to
the Revolution and to end with the
goodwill tour of the world made by
t he Un it e d S t at e s Nav y i n 19 0 8. H i s
initial aim was to chart the “strug-
gles and contributions of the Negro
people.” He went about it the way
he approached the Migration pan-
els and his other historical series,
which included multipicture ac-
counts of Toussaint L’Ouverture,
Harriet Tubman, Frederick Doug-
lass, and John Brown. That is, he
first immersed himself, at a library
desk, in the histories and pictures
he found.
Although they were not the ear-
liest ones he made, he devoted one
panel to a slave revolt in 1810 and
another to a slave petition from co-
lonial days. As he worked, though,
he realized that his subject encom-
passed more than the “Negro peo-
ple.” He found himself wanting to
form images for, among other sub-
jects, the Declaration of Indepen-
dence, the Boston Tea Party, the
murder of Alexander Hamilton,
and the Battle of New Orleans and
other aspects of the War of 1812.
He planned to have the pro-
jected sixty works completed byJacob Lawrence: Massacre in Boston, 12 x 16 inches, 1954 –1955; panel 2 from
Struggle: From the History of the American PeopleCollection^ofHarvey^and^Harvey-AnnRoss^ /PEM/BobPackert*As it happens, the Modern is currently
exhibiting its half, and ten of the pan-
els owned by the Phillips are part of an
exhibition at the Whitney Museum of
American Art entitled “Vida Amer-
icana: Mexican Muralists Remake
American Art, 1925–1945.”Jacob Lawrence: I shall hazard much and can possibly gain nothing by the issue
of the interview... — Hamilton before his duel with Burr, 1804, 12 x 16 inches, 1956 ;
panel 17 from Struggle: From the History of the American PeopleCollection^ofHarvey^ andHarvey-AnnRoss^ /PEM/BobPackert