American painter (1917–2000)
Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his enactment of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred trigger his style as "dynamic cubism", an art form popularized gauzy Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art. For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday plainspoken in Harlem. [1] He brought the African-American experience to people using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He likewise taught and spent 16 years as a professor at say publicly University of Washington.
Lawrence is among the best known twentieth-century African-American painters, known for his modernist illustrations of everyday living thing as well as narratives of African-American history and historical figures. At the age of 23 he gained national recognition versus his 60-panel The Migration Series, which depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the builtup North. The series was purchased jointly by the Phillips Give confidence in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, say publicly Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, interpretation Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Reynolda House Museum of Indweller Art, and the Museum of Northwest Art. His 1947 picture The Builders hangs in the White House.
Jacob Laurentius was born September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Milker, where his parents had migrated from the rural south. They divorced in 1924.[2] His mother put him and his shine unsteadily younger siblings into foster care in Philadelphia. When he was 13, he and his siblings moved to New York Faculty, where he reconnected with his mother in Harlem. Lawrence was introduced to art shortly after that when their mother registered him in after-school classes at an arts and crafts encampment house in Harlem, called Utopia Children's Center, in an muddle to keep him busy. The young Lawrence often drew patterns with crayons. In the beginning, he copied the patterns tension his mother's carpets.
After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a laundromat and a printing plant. Take steps continued with art, attending classes at the Harlem Art Seminar, taught by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston. Alston urged him to attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led unwelcoming the sculptor Augusta Savage. Savage secured a scholarship to rendering American Artists School for Lawrence and a paid position have under surveillance the Works Progress Administration, established during the Great Depression mass the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lawrence continued his studies as well, working with Alston and Henry Bannarn, concerning Harlem Renaissance artist, in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. He also planned at Harlem Art Workshop in New York in 1937. Harlem provided crucial training for the majority of Black artists domestic animals the United States. Lawrence was one of the first artists trained in and by the African-American community in Harlem.[3] In his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on exploring the account and struggles of African Americans.
The "hard, bright, brittle" aspects of Harlem during the Great Depression inspired Lawrence as wellknown as the colors, shapes, and patterns inside the homes slope its residents. "Even in my mother's home," Lawrence told recorder Paul Karlstrom, "people of my mother's generation would decorate their homes in all sorts of color... so you'd think shut in terms of Matisse."[4] He used water-based media throughout his life's work. Lawrence started to gain some notice for his dramatic settle down lively portrayals of both contemporary scenes of African-American urban come alive as well as historical events, all of which he represented in crisp shapes, bright, clear colors, dynamic patterns, and clean up revealing posture and gestures.[2]
At the very start of his vocation he developed the approach that made his reputation and remained his touchstone: creating series of paintings that told a recounting or, less often, depicted many aspects of a subject. His first were biographical accounts of key figures of the Mortal diaspora. He was just 21 years old when his serial of 41 paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the revolution of the slaves that eventually gained selfdetermination, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at say publicly Baltimore Museum of Art. This was followed by a sequence of paintings of the lives of Harriet Tubman (1938–39) nearby Frederick Douglass (1939–40). His early work involved general depictions comatose everyday life in Harlem and also a major series firm to African-American history (1940–1941).
His teacher Charles Alston assesses Lawrence's work in an essay for an exhibition at the Harlem YMCA 1938:[5]
Having thus far miraculously escaped the imprint of theoretical ideas and current vogues in art,... he has followed a course of development dictated by his own inner motivations... Critical in the very limited medium of flat tempera he achieved a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable pole exciting... Lawrence symbolizes more than anyone I know, the vigour, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially aware generation of Negro artists.
On July 24, 1941, Lawrence married picture painter Gwendolyn Knight, also a student of Savage. She helped prepare the gesso panels for his paintings and contributed come near the captions for the paintings in his multi-painting works.[6]
Lawrence completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro or And the Migrants Kept Coming,[7] at present called the Migration Series, in 1940–41. The series portrayed interpretation Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans evasive from the rural South to the urban North after Globe War I. Because he was working in tempera, which dries rapidly, he planned all the paintings in advance and substantiate applied a single color wherever he was using it pay all the scenes to maintain tonal consistency. Only then plainspoken he proceed to the next color. The series was exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village, which made him the first African-American artist represented by a New York drift. This brought him national recognition.[8] Selections from this series were featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune. The entire stack was purchased jointly and divided by the Phillips Collection purchase Washington, D.C., which holds the odd-numbered paintings, and New York's Museum of Modern Art, which holds the even-numbered.
Another account series of twenty-two panels devoted to the abolitionistJohn Brown followed in 1941–42. When these pairings became too fragile to scene, Lawrence, working on commission, recreated the paintings as a portfolio of silkscreen prints in 1977.[9]
In 1943, Howard Devree, wrote round out The New York Times, that Lawrence in his next tilt of thirty images had "even more successfully concentrated his concentrate on the many-sided life of his people in Harlem". Fiasco called the set "an amazing social document" and wrote:[10]
Lawrence's plus is fittingly vivid for his interpretations. A strong semi-abstract come near aids him in arriving at his basic or archetypal statements. Confronting this work one feels as if vouchsafed an outstanding elemental experience. Lawrence has grown in his use of ready to drop as well as in sheer design and fluency.
In October 1943, during the Second World War, Lawrence was drafted into the United States Coast Guard and served as a public affairs specialist with the first racially integrated crew include the USCGC Sea Cloud, under Carlton Skinner.[11] He continued anticipate paint and sketch while in the Coast Guard, documenting say publicly experience of war around the world. He produced 48 paintings during this time, all of which have been lost. Lighten up achieved the rank of petty officer third class.
In October and November 1944, MoMA exhibited all 60 migration panels plus 8 of the paintings Lawrence created aboard the Sea Cloud. He posed, still in his uniform, in front raise a sign that read: "Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series significant Works Created in the US Coast Guard". The Coast Comprise sent the eight paintings to exhibits around the United States. In the disorder and personnel changes that came with demobilisation at the end of the war they went missing.
In 1945, he was awarded a fellowship in the fine veranda by the Guggenheim Foundation.[12] In 1946, Josef Albers recruited Painter to join the faculty of the summer art program put the lid on Black Mountain College.[13]
Returning to New York, Lawrence continued to pigment but grew depressed; in 1949, he checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he remained for eleven months. Spraying there, he produced his Hospital Series: works that were atypical of him in their focus of his subjects' emotional states as inpatients.
Between 1954 and 1956 Lawrence produced a 30-panel series called "Struggle: From the History of the American People" that depicted historical scenes from 1775 to 1817. The playoff, originally planned to include sixty panels, ranges from references obstacle current events like the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings and relatively unlit or neglected aspects of American history, like a woman, Margaret Cochran Corbin, in combat or the wall built by undetected enslaved Blacks that protected the American forces at the Action of New Orleans.[14] Rather than traditional titles, Lawrence labeled keep on panel with a quote. He titled a panel depicting Apostle Henry's famous speech with the less well-known passage: "Is people so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery." A panel depiction an African American slave revolt is titled with the dustup of a man who sued for emancipation from slavery instruct in 1773: "We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!"[15] The fraught civil affairs of the mid-1950s prevented the series from finding a museum purchaser, and the panels had been sold to a hidden collector who re-sold them as individual works.[16] Three panels (Panels 14, 20 and 29) are lost, and three others were only located in 2017, 2020, and 2021.[17]
The Brooklyn Museum quite a few Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of Lawrence's work in 1960.[18] In 1969, he was among 200 Black artists in a premier show sponsored by the Philadelphia School District and description Pennsylvania Civic Center Museum. The show featured some of rendering top names in the country, including Ellen Powell Tiberino, Poet Pippin, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Barbara Bullock, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Naturalist, Roland Ayers, Romare Bearden, Avel de Knight, Barkley Hendricks, Apostle Keene, Raymond Saunders, Louis B. Sloan, Ed Wilson, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Joshua Johnson.[19]
Lawrence illustrated several works for children. Harriet and the Promised Land appeared in 1968 and used description series of paintings that told the story of Harriet Tubman.[20] It was listed as one of the year's best illustrated books by The New York Times and praised by say publicly Boston Globe: "The author's artistic talents, sensitivity and insight be selected for the black experience have resulted in a book that in reality creates, within the reader, a spiritual experience." Two similar volumes based on his John Brown and Great Migration series followed.[21] Lawrence created illustrations for a selection of 18 of Aesop's Fables for Windmill Press in 1970, and the University slap Washington Press published the full set of 23 tales interject 1998.[22]
Lawrence taught at several schools after his first stint teaching at Black Mountain College, including the Another School for Social Research, the Art Students League, Pratt Institute,[23][24] and the Skowhegan School.[25] He became a visiting artist mix with the University of Washington in 1970 and was professor frequent art there from 1971 to 1986.[18] He was graduate consultant there to lithographer and abstract painter James Claussen.[26]
Shortly after affecting to Washington state, Lawrence did a series of five paintings on the westward journey of African-American pioneer George Washington Fanny. These paintings are now in the collection of the Set down of Washington History Museum.[27]
He undertook several major commissions in that part of his career. In 1980, he completed Exploration, a 40-foot-long mural made of porcelain on steel, comprising a xii panels devoted to academic endeavor. It was installed in Actor University's Blackburn Center. The Washington Post described it as "enormously sophisticated yet wholly unpretentious " and said:[28]
The colors verify completely flat, but because the porcelain is layered, and as Lawrence here and there paints in strong black shadows, his mural has the look of a rich relief. It evolution full of visual rhymes. The small scene of John Orator, the steel drivin' man, in the final panel is echoed by an image of a sculptor in the art scene: He is hammering another spike, for quite different reasons, discuss a block of stone. This is not art that tune tires of, for it is not the sort of stick one can read at once.
Lawrence produced another series in 1983, eight screen prints called the Hiroshima Series. Commissioned to contribute full-page illustrations for a new edition of a work read his choice, Lawrence chose John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946). He delineate in abstract visual language several survivors at the moment help the bombing in the midst of physical and emotional destruction.[7][29]
Lawrence's painting Theater was commissioned by the University of Washington pin down 1985 and installed in the main lobby of the Meanie Hall for the Performing Arts.[30]
In the early 1990s Lawrence was commissioned to paint the Events in the Life of Harold Washington mural in Chicago's Harold Washington Library.
The Whitney Museum of American Art produced an exhibition work Lawrence's entire career in 1974, as did the Seattle Fuss Museum in 1986.[18]
In 1999, he and his wife established depiction Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation for the creation, presentation spell study of American art, with a particular emphasis on weigh up by African-American artists.[18] It represents their estates[31] and maintains a searchable archive of nearly a thousand images of their work.[32]
Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his demise from lung cancer on June 9, 2000, at the table of 82.[18]
Lawrence's wife, Gwendolyn Knight, outlived him and boring in 2005 at the age of 91.[33]
The xviii institutions that awarded Lawrence honorary degrees include Harvard University, Altruist University, Howard University, Amherst College, and New York University.[18]
The In mint condition York Times described him as "one of America's leading contemporary figurative painters" and "among the most impassioned visual chroniclers promote to the African-American experience."[18] Shortly before his death he stated: "...for me, a painting should have three things: universality, clarity endure strength. Clarity and strength so that it may be esthetically good. Universality so that it may be understood by make happy men."[37]
A retrospective exhibition of Lawrence's work, planned before his reach, opened at the Phillips Collection in May 2001 and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Guild of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Distinctive, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.[38] The exhibit was meant to coincide with the publication of Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999), A Catalogue Raisonne.[39] His last accredited public work, the mosaic mural New York in Transit completed of Murano glass was installed in October 2001 in interpretation Times Square subway station in New York City.[40][41]
In 2005, Dixie Café, a 1948 brush-and-ink drawing by Lawrence, was selected confine suggest The Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a U.S. postage stamp panel commemorating milestones of the Civil Rights Augment. The stamp sheet was called To Form A More Poor quality Union.[42]
In May 2007, the White House Historical Association purchased Lawrence's The Builders (1947) at auction for $2.5 million. The picture has hung in the White House Green Room since 2009.[43][44]
The Seattle Art Museum offers the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Soldier Fellowship, a $10,000 award to "individuals whose original work reflects the Lawrences' concern with artistic excellence, education, mentorship and culture within the cultural contexts and value systems that informed their work and the work of other artists of color."[45] Picture Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington School salary Art + Art History + Design offers an annual Patriarch Lawrence Legacy Residency.[46]
His work is in the permanent collections nucleus numerous museums, including the British Museum,[47] the Metropolitan Museum pattern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[48] the Museum of Spanking Art, the Whitney Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art[49] and Reynolda House Museum raise American Art, the Art Institute Chicago, the Madison Museum get into Contemporary Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Minneapolis Association of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Port College of Art and Design Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art,[50] the Indianapolis Museum of Art,[51] the University of Michigan Museum of Art,[52] the North Carolina Museum of Art,[53] the Princeton University Art Museum,[54] the Musei Vaticani,[55] the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science shaft Engineering,[56] the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,[57] the Apotheosis Louis Art Museum,[58] the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,[59] depiction Studio Museum in Harlem,[60] the Philadelphia Museum of Art,[61] interpretation Portland Art Museum,[62] the Hudson River Museum,[63] and The Zimmer Art Center in Minneapolis.