Hello, my name is Paul Priestley. Welcome to art History School,
the home of art history for everybody. Today we are going to look at the American artist,
Jacob Lawrence, one of most widely acclaimed American artists of the 20th century,
best known for illustrating the African American experience and history in the US.
Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, USA on the 7th September 1917. His parents were
Jacob, a railway cook, and Rosa Lee. In 1919 his father moved the family to Easton, Pennsylvania,
hoping to find work as a coal miner, his sister Geraldine was born that year too.
Lawrence's parents separated in 1924 and his mother took the children to Philadelphia where
his brother William was born. Later, in 1927 his mother moved to New York City to look for work and
for the next three years Lawrence and his siblings were left in foster homes in Philadelphia.
In 1930 his mother united the family and moved to 142 West Street in Harlem, New York.
During the early 1930’s the Depression was acute, Lawrence’s mother lost her job and
the family had to go on welfare. Lawrence was enrolled in Public School 89 in Harlem,
and at the Utopia Children’s Centre, that provided after school programs in arts and crafts.
The centre was run by the painter Charles Alston who soon recognized young Lawrence’s talents.
In 1932 Lawrence attended the High School of Commerce for two years whilst continuing to
study with Charles Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop. It was here he met Gwendolyn Knight
who would become his wife. Lawrence's mother had hoped her son might become a postman,
but Lawrence had other ideas. Having regularly visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art with
Gwendolyn, he was fascinated by early Italian Renaissance masters such as Giotto and Duccio,
and so decided to drop out of high school. Success came very early, in 1935 at the age
of eighteen Lawrence had his first exhibition with the 306 group show at the Alston Barnham studio in
Harlem. He was renting a small space in the corner of Alston's studio at the time and did so until
1940. His early paintings depict his environment, his studio, street scenes of his neighbourhood,
and everyday life in Harlem using commercial paint on lightweight brown paper. Lawrence became
the first major artist of the 20th-century to be technically trained and artistically
educated within the art community in Harlem. Lawrence had his first solo exhibition in 1936
and also met Charles Seifert, a lecturer and historian who inspired him to focus on
the historical narrative and struggle of African Americans. He began his researches at the Harlem
branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture.
During the same year he saw DuBois's play, Haiti at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Suddenly,
Haiti became a focus and in particular the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black revolutionary
general and founder of the Republic of Haiti. Lawrence felt a single painting would not do
justice to L’Ouverture’s numerous achievements, so he produced a series of 41 panels in total.
In 1937, with the assistance of the artist Harry Gottlieb, Lawrence obtained a two-year scholarship
to the American Artists School in New York, where he studied with Eugene Morley,
Philip Reisman, and Sol Wilson. But he was still very poor
and until he reached the age of 21, he was unable to join President Roosevelt's New Deal,
an integral source of income to artists during the Great Depression. So he supported himself and his
family by delivering newspapers, labouring and working as a printer. But in 1938 with the help
of sculptor Augusta Savage, he got a position in the Federal Art Project's easel division
earning the princely sum of $23.86 cents a week. In 1939 Lawrence exhibited in a two-person show
with Samuel Wechsler at the American Artists School.
A review in ART News, praised Lawrence's style stating it was "easy to call it primitive...but
closer inspection reveals draughtsmanship too accomplished to be called naïve."
Lawrence received a $1,500 fellowship in 1940 from the Julius Rosenwald Fund which allowed
him to rent an unheated studio loft in Harlem. He started research for his 60-panel Migration
of the Negro series at the Schomburg Collection. This would become one of his most acclaimed works,
inspired by the African-American Great Migration, the movement of 6 million black Americans
out of the rural Southern United States to the industrial cities in the North and Midwest
that occurred between 1916 and 1970’s. In fact, Lawrence’s own parents had undertaken the same
migration, like many others, in search of better economic conditions and less racial oppression.
These panels of the Great Migration, as well as others by Lawrence, are linked together by
captions, colour, and design and descriptive phrases which Gwendolyn Knight helped him write.
In 1941 Lawrence’s Migration series was exhibited at the prestigious
Downtown Gallery in New York. The show received wide acclaim. At the age of twenty-four Lawrence
had become the first Black American artist to be represented by a “mainstream” gallery.
During the same month Fortune magazine published a lengthy article about him illustrating twenty-six
of the series’ sixty panels. On the 24 July Lawrence
married Gwendoline Knight. Their first trip together was to New Orleans in the South.
While there he painted, The Life of John Brown, a series of 22 images depicting the life
of the man whose raid on Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, helped to start the American Civil War.
In 1943 Lawrence was drafted into the Coast Guard and served his first year in St. Augustine,
Florida, in a racially segregated regiment. He held the rank of Steward’s Mate,
the only one available to black Americans at the time. After befriending a commander,
who shared his interest in art, Lawrence was assigned to the American Navy’s first racially
integrated ship. He was promoted in rank, he served out the war as a combat artist, documenting
the conflict in Italy, England, Egypt, and India. In 1946 Lawrence was invited to teach at Black
Mountain College in North Carolina. The school was a refuge for European avant-garde artists,
including Josef Albers and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus.
They had fled the Second World War and became the creative incubator for many of the post-war
generation of American Modernists like Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland.
Lawrence was commissioned in 1947 by Walker Evans, the photographer,
to paint 10 paintings on the theme of ‘Life in the Heart of the Black Belt’,
as a consequence Lawrence travelled to Mississippi, Alabama,
New Orleans, and Memphis. In this painting, one of the ten works, you can see the protagonists,
surrounded by their worldly possessions, waiting in a Southern railway station for a train to
take them North. The anonymity of these largely faceless figures emphasizes their shared desire
to seek a better life. Three of the 10 paintings were published in Fortune magazine in August 1948.
By 1949 Lawrence was the most prominent black artist in America, but he struggled with the
emotional and psychological burden of assuming such a symbolic status. The result was a mental
breakdown and a stay at the mental facility at Hillside Hospital, New York where he was treated
for depression. Lawrence stayed at the hospital, apart from a short break, until August 1950.
Whilst there he painted and became obsessed with the importance of painting
from personal experience as is clearly demonstrated by his 1950 Hospital series.
In 1953 Edith Halpert and Charles Alan created the new Alan gallery, an off shoot
of the Downtown Gallery to represent the work of the younger artists, including Lawrence.
The Downtown Gallery would then specialise in the artists who’d been with the gallery
for more than 30 years. Lawrence was unhappy with the arrangement, but in 1956
and 1958 the first 30 panels of his History of the American People series called ‘Struggle’,
were exhibited at the Alan Gallery. The remaining 30 panels in the series were never completed.
Struggle was acquired by a private collector, but later split into individual collections.
In 1959 Lawrence tied with the artist Stuart Davis for a competition to design a mural for the United
Nations building in New York. The project, was never completed,. The following year he
had a solo retrospective exhibition at Brooklyn Museum which toured nationally to 16 venues.
The beginnings of the 1960’s saw Lawrence create paintings on themes relating to police violence,
civil rights, interracial marriage, integrated education, and nonviolent protest in America.
He was known as a gentle but tough artist, who, in the words of art historian Patricia Hills,
"never swerved from his commitment to the struggle for a fair and just society."
Lawrence's work had matured, and this coincided with the establishment of many black artist groups
in New York. However, although he exerted considerable influence on contemporary black
artists, Lawrence remained an outsider due to his already-prominent stature in the art world.
He travelled to Nigeria with an exhibition including his paintings from the Migration and War
series and lectured on the influence of African sculpture on European and American Modernist art,
particularly Cubism. He returned to Nigeria in 1964 and
stayed for eight months to teach and steep himself in Nigerian culture so that his paintings "might
show the influence of the great African artistic tradition." While there, Lawrence
completed paintings and drawings of African life and experimented with new painting techniques.
In 1970 he accepted a professorship in Art at the University of Washington and continued to teach
there until he retired in 1983. Also, that year he became the first visual artist to receive the
Spingarn Medal, the NAACP's highest award. It is given annually to an individual of African descent
and American citizenship. He was commissioned by Edition
Olympia in 1972 to create a silkscreen print for the Munich Olympic Games. He created this image
of five black runners, referencing Jesse Owens's triumphant victory in Berlin in 1936.
1974 saw the Whitney Museum of American Art open with a retrospective of Lawrence's paintings that
travelled to five other US venues. The following year he co-founded the Rainbow Art Foundation in
New York with Willem de Kooning, and others to help young printmakers in the production,
exhibition, and marketing of their work. 1977 saw the Presidential Inauguration Committee
in Washington, DC, to commission Lawrence to create a limited-edition print commemorating the
inauguration of President Jimmy Carter. Lawrence created an image of an ethnically diverse crowd
straining to see the inauguration from a great distance. Later in 1979, Lawrence completed
his first mural commission, called, ‘Games’, for Kingdome Stadium in Seattle, Washington.
In 1980 he completed a mural for Howard University, dedicated to the
black educator Mary McLeod Bethune. Lawrence received the Artist Award
from the College Art Association in 1989 and the Images Award for Outstanding Achievement
in Art from the University of Pittsburgh. Later that year he collaborated with the Workshop,
Inc. to produce the print Amistad to commemorate the 1839 mutiny aboard the Amistad slave ship.
The following year he received the National Medal of Arts from President George H.W. Bush.
Later in 1994 Peter Nesbett began preliminary research for a catalogue raisonné of Lawrence’s
paintings, drawings, and murals. Unfortunately, in 1998 Lawrence was diagnosed with lung cancer,
but that did not stop him establishing with his wife Gwendolyn, the Jacob and
Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation to promote and support American art.
Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death on 9 June 2000 at
his home in Seattle. He was 82 years old. Jacob Lawrence is celebrated not only for his artistic
achievements and the dramatic impact he had on succeeding generations of artists. But also,
for a number of firsts, being one of the first Black American artists to achieve widespread,
mainstream acclaim, and to be the first to be represented by a commercial gallery, the Downtown
Gallery in New York. Jacob Lawrence was one of the few painters of his generation who grew up in a
black community, to be taught primarily by black artists, and to be influenced by black people.
Thank you for watching, I hope you have really enjoyed learning about Jacob Lawrence,
a truly wonderful artist. If you have, then please subscribe to my channel and if you do,
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