and time suspended, as if the artist recorded the major details of a
poignant personal memory. From the darkened streets outside a
restaurant in Nighthawks (FIG. 35-63), the viewer glimpses the
lighted interior through huge plate-glass windows, which lend the
inner space the paradoxical sense of being both a safe refuge and a
vulnerable place for the three customers and the counterman. The
seeming indifference of Hopper’s characters to one another and the
echoing spaces that surround them suggest the pervasive loneliness
of modern humans. In Nighthawks and other works, Hopper created
a Realist vision recalling that of 19th-century artists such as Thomas
Eakins (FIG. 30-38) and Henry Ossawa Tanner (FIG. 30-40), but, con-
sistent with more recent trends in painting, he simplified the shapes
in a move toward abstraction.JACOB LAWRENCEAfrican American artist Jacob Lawrence
(1917–2000) found his subjects in modern history, concentrating on
the culture and history of his own people. Lawrence moved to
Harlem, New York, in 1927 at about age 10. There, he came under
the spell of the African art and the African American history he
found in lectures and exhibitions and in the special programs spon-
sored by the 135th Street New York Public Library, which had out-
standing collections of African American art and archival data. In-
spired by the politically oriented art of Goya (FIG. 30-13), Daumier
(FIG. 30-30), and Orozco (FIG. 35-67), and influenced by the many
artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance whom he met, includ-
ing Aaron Douglas (FIG. 35-36), Lawrence found his subjects in the
everyday life of Harlem and in African American history.
In 1941, Lawrence began a 60-painting series titled The Migration
of the Negro,in which he defined his own vision of the continuing
African American struggle against discrimination. Unlike his earlier
historical paintings depicting important figures in American history,such as the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, this
series called attention to a contemporaneous event—the ongoing exo-
dus of black labor from the southern United States. Disillusioned with
their lives in the South, hundreds of thousands of African Americans
migrated north in the years following World War I, seeking improved
economic opportunities and more hospitable political and social con-
ditions. This subject had personal relevance to Lawrence:
I was part of the migration, as was my family, my mother, my sister,
and my brother....I grew up hearing tales about people “coming
up,” another family arriving....I didn’t realize what was happening
until about the middle of the 1930s, and that’s when the Migration
series began to take form in my mind.^53
The “documentation” of the period, such as the RA program,
ignored African Americans, and thus this major demographic shift
remained largely invisible to most Americans. Of course, the condi-
tions African Americans encountered both during their migration
and in the North were often as difficult and discriminatory as those
they had left behind in the South.
Lawrence’s series provides numerous vignettes capturing the
experiences of these migrating people. Often, a sense of bleakness
and of the degradation of African American life dominates the im-
ages.No. 49 (FIG. 35-64) of this series bears the caption “They also
found discrimination in the North although it was much different
from that which they had known in the South.” The artist depicted a
blatantly segregated dining room with a barrier running down the
room’s center separating the whites on the left from the African
Americans on the right. To ensure a continuity and visual integrity
among all 60 paintings, Lawrence interpreted his themes systemati-
cally in rhythmic arrangements of bold, flat, and strongly colored
shapes. His style drew equally from his interest in the push-pull956 Chapter 35 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1900 TO 194535-63Edward Hopper,Nighthawks,1942. Oil on canvas, 2 6 4 8 ––^1116 . Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (Friends of American Art Collection).
The seeming indifference of Hopper’s characters to one another, and the echoing spaces that surround them, evoke the overwhelming loneliness
and isolation of Depression-era life in the United States.1 ft.