Jacob Lawrence: Painting Black History and the Great Migration

[00:00:00]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,   please do not forget to click the little  black bell, because that will tell you   when my latest videos are released. If you  want to support the making of these videos,   then please check out my Patreon channel where you  will find lots of interesting rewards in return   for your patronage. Thank you for watching,  I will see you in the next video. Goodbye.