30 The New York Review
1956, but by then he had done only
thirty, and it was thought to show this
first half that year. But perhaps because
the possibility of a single buyer was at
first remote—he very much wanted
them to stay together—he did not con-
tinue. (They have not stayed together.)
Maybe he felt that he had said enough.
Much as one would like to know how
he would have handled his projected
next large topics—the Civil War and
industrialism—the pictures in the
Met’s show, which was organized by
the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem,
Massachusetts, feel like a full story in
themselves, in part because they do not
add up neatly. In many instances, Law-
rence’s meanings are elusive.
His showing blood in so many
scenes, for instance, is odd. The drip-
ping red can sometimes seem like an
unnecessary touch, a mannerism or a
decoration. Yet sometimes the blood
is shockingly effective. In Massacre
in Boston, which is about an uprising
against the British in 1770 that resulted
in the death of Crispus Attucks, a sea-
man of African and Indigenous de-
scent, Lawrence shows the dying man’s
head as an almost faceless mound emit-
ting a gush of blood.
In a startling image connected to the
War of 1812, a sailor caught in shred-
ded sails—only his face and arm are
visible—has just been stabbed in the
eye, though we don’t see who wields the
sword. Lawrence’s image of Hamilton’s
duel with Aaron Burr goes straight, as
perhaps few other accounts do, for the
physical, human consequence of the
moment. While Burr is but a shadow on
the ground, Hamilton is no Founding
Father in a wig but a ruined mere man,
about to topple forward, blood stream-
ing from the chest he clutches.
Many of the contributors to the lively
catalog for the show rightly look at the
political implications of Lawrence’s se-
ries. He wasn’t a political artist in the
sense that Ben Shahn was; Shahn’s im-
ages could be declarations of his posi-
tions on issues of the moment. But as
the Migration pictures show, Lawrence
was keenly aware of the costs of being
Black in America. We read that during
the years when he was working on the
Struggle panels he kept clippings on the
Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of
Education decision and the Montgom-
ery bus boycott. Few viewers, moreover,
can now look at a picture in the series
entitled Trappers, which shows one of
the freshly killed elk hanging from a
branch, without thinking of lynching.
Speaking in some ways for other
writers in the catalog, Randall Griffey,
a curator at the Met, notes that “Law-
rence’s Struggle series features new
and different story lines that expand
upon triumphalist national narratives
in which heroic white men take center
stage.” That Lawrence was saying that
the “triumphalist” story lines could
stand a dose of reality is made clear,
at least on the face of it, by many of
the panels. Certainly this is true of the
picture whose title is the beginning
of the Preamble of the Constitution:
We, the people of the United States, in
order to form a more perfect Union,
establish justice, insure domestic tran-
quility...—17 September 1787 (see
illustration on page 10). The image ac-
companying these words presents little
tranquility. Divided roughly in three, it
shows at the top what might be curtains.
In the center we see the delegates to
the convention, gesticulating in threat-
ening ways and sweating profusely. (It
was famously hot at the time.) On the
bottom third there is a table on which
are simply the many swords left for the
moment by the delegates.
This description might make Law-
rence’s aim sound satiric. His feuding
and buffoonish delegates surely make
us feel the hypocrisy in the words of
the Preamble, particularly as we know
that we are looking at the work of an
African- American artist. And yet
the verve, ingenuity, and humor with
which Lawrence has engineered his
image takes a viewer into a differentrealm than that of satire or indigna-
tion. The sheer three- part architecture
of the scene—in which the curtains at
the top have a stateliness and mystery,
the delegates in the middle register
are cramped, cross marionettes, and
the swords on the bottom third of the
picture are like cars parked in a drive-
way—has a life of its own.
That the colors of the scene are lim-
ited to a metallic black, white, gray,
and shades of tan (each sword has a
little blue line on it, too) enhances the
great formal pleasure we take from
the work. And in many pictures it is a
combination of the wonderfully showy
brilliance of Lawrence’s drawing and
design and the elliptical, buried, what-
am- I-looking- at nature of some of the
stories being presented that hit a viewer
first and are perhaps what we are left
with at the end.
The Tea Party image, for example,
which appears to show three figuresconverging from different sides of the
picture—but only one has a fully clear
face, and that a mask—reads if any-
thing like a moment in a dance per-
formance when everyone on stage is
caught in a jumble of cloaks. The image
of Paul Revere’s ride to alert his fellow
colonists of the British advance is also,
to its benefit, hard at first to decipher
and stage set–like in its shallow space.
Revere’s black horse, plunging forward
in the center, might be our protagonist.
Its face is the easiest to make out. But it
is smaller than the riled men around it.
Which one is Revere is not immediately
apparent and, perhaps because of the
high boots and smart blue tunics someof the men wear, one might almost be
seeing a moment during the civil war
that followed the Russian Revolution.
Lawrence adds to the ambiguity that
plays over some of these panels with
the titles he has given them. Some are
oddly flat in themselves and yet take on
life when read alongside the images.
Tagged to the bristling action of the
Revere picture is the mild I alarmed
almost every house till I got to Lexing-
ton.—Paul Revere.
Another panel is derived from the
last sentence of the Declaration of In-
dependence: ...we mutually pledge to
each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and
our sacred Honour —4 July 1776. What
relation the accompanying image has
to these words, however, is up to the
viewer. In this hallucinatory scene, we
see a farmer who is largely enveloped
in a downpour of spiky hay. A mus-
ket, pitchfork, scythe, and rake stand
by as, grim- faced, he trudges, bucketin hand, into the hay. Are we looking
at Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman hero
facing the backbreaking reality of a
farmer’s life? Is Lawrence ironically
undercutting, if not the words in the
Declaration, then Jefferson’s notion of
the ideal citizen of the new republic?
Our confusion makes the work only
more engaging.When Lawrence eventually decided
not to continue with the Struggle se-
ries, he also turned away from the
fierce emotions and sometimes austere,
restrained color of the work. Although
his drawing style continued to evolve,
and future scenes might be comprised
of innumerable tiny, interlocking el-
ements, he left behind, too, the com-
pressed Cubist- and- Expressionist style
he created for his Struggle pictures.
And while he continued to include now
and then figures with white faces in his
pictures—his many scenes of carpen-
ters often show Black and white work-
men on the same job—he did not again
give central positions in his scenes to
white people. In many ways, Struggle
represented a momentary transforma-
tion of his art.
There was, however, some prece-
dent for it. The catalogue raisonnée of
Lawrence’s work shows that in the first
half of the 1950s, as he drew forms and
arranged his pictures with increasing
virtuosity, there are paintings here and
there that resemble panels in the Strug-
gle series. Many have to do with per-
formers on stage and theater life, which
he seems to have been encountering
for the first time. In scenes of wildly
costumed vaudevillians at the Apollo
Theater, for instance, we are given a
preview of the Art Deco–like way he
makes the jazzy mountain of hay in his
panel of the Jeffersonian farmer. But
there may have been a stronger factor
behind the new formal and emotional
bite that Lawrence brought to Struggle.
The early 1950s must have been for
him as a painter a time of upheaval,
or at least serious questioning. Like
some other artists who matured in an
earlier time, he had been sheltered
from the waves of new, often abstract
art coming from Europe. But New
York, Lawrence’s city, had become the
headquarters of the art world’s latest
development, Abstract Expressionism,
and the notice taken of it was wide-
spread and insistent. Lawrence’s own
approach—he worked representation-
ally, making small pictures on paper
or board—might easily have been seen
as timorous in relation to the new large
abstract canvases of Willem de Koon-
ing, Jackson Pollock, and the others.
And how he responded as an artist was
bound to have some effect. He was a
public figure, and one who carried a
certain responsibility on his shoulders.
He was already then (and would long
continue to be) our foremost African-
American painter.
It goes without saying that social
and political currents in American life,
whether of the past or the present and
always risky and rarely auspicious for
African- Americans, underlie much of
the rawness and power of the Struggle
series. Wanting to handle Black “strug-
gles and contributions” was what got
Lawrence underway. But something of
the drive and willingness to experiment
that he brought to the topic may have
come from his facing an artistic strug-
gle of his own. QJacob Lawrence:... If we fail, let us fail like men, and expire together in one
common struggle... —Henry Clay, 1813, 16 x 12 inches, 1956 ; panel 23 from
Struggle: From the History of the American PeopleCollection^ofHarvey^and^Harvey-AnnRoss/PEM/BobPackert