(jazzy piano music)
- [Dr. Zucker] We're in The Phillips Collection
in Washington, D.C., and we're looking at
a series of small paintings by Jacob Lawrence.
- [Dr. Harris] This is actually a series of paintings.
There are 60 of them.
Half are here in The Phillips Collection.
The other half are in the Museum of Modern Art.
- [Dr. Zucker] Actually, MoMA has the even numbers
and The Phillips has the odd numbers.
And that was an arrangement that the artist agreed to
because these were so sought after.
- [Dr. Harris] He was young when he painted these,
and so it's a remarkable achievement
for a very young artist.
- [Dr. Zucker] And they document one of the most important
historical events in American history,
the migration of African Americans
from the agricultural South into the industrial North
at the end of the 19th and especially
in the first half of the 20th century.
So what precipitated this was not only
the extreme racism and Jim Crow Laws in the South,
but also a dearth of labor in the North.
That is, northern industrial companies had jobs to fill.
- [Dr. Harris] Six million people are estimated
to have moved during these waves of migrations.
And Lawrence's family is one of them.
- [Dr. Zucker] So people moved to New York
just like Lawrence's family did, but people also moved
to Chicago, to St. Louis, to Pittsburgh,
to all these industrial centers.
- [Dr. Harris] You have to imagine that life
was really bad in the South for people to
pick up, take all their belongings, move their families,
and there must have been the hope of
a much better life in the North.
And I think there was in many cases,
but there was also significant hardship--
- [Dr. Zucker] And racism in the North, as well.
- [Dr. Harris] And the great thing about this series
is that Lawrence captures the complexity of what happened
to people's lives when they moves.
- [Dr. Zucker] And he does that not only by
this brilliant use of color and very stark composition
using tempera on hard board, but he also does it
through his titling, which is almost a kind of poem
that weaves its way throughout these images.
- [Dr. Harris] When we look at the paintings,
we see geometric shapes, we see flat areas of color.
And there's something spare about both the words
and the images that's a big part of their power.
- [Dr. Zucker] Well he was weirdly careful
when he produced this.
He had done a tremendous amount of research
at the Schomburg Center in Harlem.
This entire series really is about movement,
it really is about change.
The very first panel and the very last panel
have to do with train stations and the movement of people.
Let's take a look at this image.
- [Dr. Harris] This is one of my favorites,
because one really has a palpable sense
of the effects of racism and discrimination.
- [Dr. Zucker] We have this gold barrier.
You have this rope that separates
the people on the right from the people on the left
in a spare field, which is upended.
We're fusing linear perspective,
giving us this exterior bird's eye view.
- [Dr. Harris] That gray background is entirely flattened.
The figures are silhouetted in these dark colors.
There's a real sense of isolation between the figures.
- [Dr. Zucker] Well the figures on the left,
the whites, are really separate.
The figure at the top left is facing away
from the people on the other side of the barrier.
- [Dr. Harris] And he looks rather haughty to me,
in the way that he looks up and out.
- [Dr. Zucker] And the man below him
is clutching his newspaper, ignoring the place setting
before him, and he seems to be
completely lost in his own thoughts.
But more than that, because of the size of his hands,
he seems to be almost clutching that newspaper,
defiantly refusing to acknowledge
anybody else in his environment.
- [Dr. Harris] There's a real economy to everything here
in terms of the shapes and the lines,
and yet there's so much expressiveness.
- [Dr. Zucker] And because Lawrence
makes the figure on the upper right so small,
we get a real sense of distance
and a sense of the isolation of that figure.
Look at the way that the artist
leads our eye from top to bottom.
Our eye falls down with a kind of increasing momentum.
And he brings us almost like a pinball machine
back and forth, zigzagging, following the line
of the barrier, but also alternating
between the figures on either side of that barrier.
- [Dr. Harris] And if we follow that barrier down
all the way to the lower right,
look how much we can tell about that figure
from such economy of form.
We can tell that this is a female figure,
that she's older.
Lawrence has painted her head lower than her shoulders,
so she seems stooped over the table
as she eats her food.
- [Dr. Zucker] And the hat that she wears
covers her so completely, her head is almost that of a bell.
It's interesting that the white figures
are the only people who have their facial features depicted.
The African Americans are given form and personality
really by the contours of their bodies.
- [Dr. Harris] I feel so much more sympathy
for the figures on the right,
for the African American figures.
Those figures on the left really do seem
aloof and almost menacing.
- [Dr. Zucker] What's fascinating is that Lawrence
is bringing a visual vocabulary that is clearly
well-versed in modernism to a subject
that in the United States really is an expression
of the modern condition of this modern migration
of industrialization, of real upheaval.
- [Dr. Harris] And by the vocabulary of modernism,
you're referring to the flattness of the forms,
the reductiveness that we see here.
But we normally think about modernism
as dispensing the subject matter with narrative.
- [Dr. Zucker] And yet here, subject matter
is beautifully woven into these stark images.
(jazzy piano music)