Jacob Lawrence

Atlantic City, Harlem, and the Harlem workshops, 1917–1939

Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on 7 September 1917. His parents had come north from the rural South, part of the same movement he would later paint. They divorced in 1924, and his mother placed Lawrence and his two younger siblings in foster care in Philadelphia. He was thirteen when the family moved to New York City and he rejoined his mother in Harlem.

His mother enrolled him in after-school classes at the Utopia Children's Center, an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, mainly to keep him occupied. Lawrence drew patterns in crayon, copying the designs in his mother's carpets. He later traced his eye for color to those rooms, telling the historian Paul Karlstrom that people of his mother's generation decorated their homes in so much color that "you'd think in terms of Matisse."

Lawrence left school at sixteen and took work in a laundromat and a printing plant. He kept painting, attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop taught by the artist Charles Alston, and later working beside Alston and Henry Bannarn in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. He was studying at the Harlem Art Workshop again in 1937.

Charles Alston urged him to go to the Harlem Community Art Center, which the sculptor Augusta Savage ran. Savage secured him a scholarship to the American Artists School and a paid position with the Works Progress Administration, the federal employment program of the Depression years. Harlem supplied the training for most Black artists in the United States at that time, and Lawrence was one of the first to be taught entirely inside that community.

He began making series almost immediately. At twenty-one he showed forty-one paintings on the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the general who led the slave revolt that ended in Haitian independence, in an exhibition of African American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A series on Harriet Tubman followed in 1938 and 1939, and one on Frederick Douglass in 1939 and 1940.

Working in the very limited medium of flat tempera he achieved a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable and exciting

The Migration Series and the Downtown Gallery, 1940–1942

Lawrence painted The Migration Series in 1940 and 1941. It is sixty panels on the Great Migration, the movement of hundreds of thousands of African Americans out of the rural South to the cities of the North after the First World War. He titled it The Migration of the Negro, and it has also been shown as And the Migrants Kept Coming. Every panel carries a caption of about one sentence explaining what the scene shows.

Tempera dries fast and cannot be reworked once it is down, so Lawrence planned the whole sequence before he started. He laid the panels out together and applied one color to every board that needed it, beginning with black and moving towards the lighter tones, then mixed the next color and went round again. The panels are casein tempera on hardboard, twelve by eighteen inches, over a gesso ground of rabbit-skin glue and whiting.

On 24 July 1941 Lawrence married the painter Gwendolyn Knight, who had also studied with Augusta Savage. Knight prepared the gesso panels he painted on and worked with him on the captions for his series.

The series was exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village, which made Lawrence the first African American artist represented by a New York gallery. Fortune printed a selection of the panels in 1941. The Phillips Collection in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in New York then bought the set together and split it in 1942, the Phillips taking the odd-numbered panels and the Museum of Modern Art the even-numbered ones. All sixty were shown together again at the Phillips Collection in an exhibition that opened in October 2016.

A second biographical set followed in 1941 and 1942: twenty-two panels on the abolitionist John Brown. When those paintings grew too fragile to exhibit, Lawrence was commissioned to remake them as a portfolio of silkscreen prints, which he finished in 1977.

The Coast Guard, the lost paintings, and Hillside Hospital, 1943–1950

Lawrence was drafted into the United States Coast Guard in October 1943 and served as a public affairs specialist. He was posted to the USCGC Sea Cloud under Carlton Skinner, the first racially integrated crew in the service. He painted and sketched throughout, and reached the rank of petty officer third class.

He made forty-eight paintings during the war and all of them are lost. In October and November 1944 the Museum of Modern Art showed the sixty Migration panels together with eight of the Sea Cloud paintings, and Lawrence was photographed in uniform beside the exhibition sign. The Coast Guard then sent those eight works out to exhibitions around the country, and they went missing in the disorder and staff changes of demobilization at the end of the war.

The Guggenheim Foundation gave him a fellowship in the fine arts in 1945. The following year Josef Albers recruited him to teach in the summer art program at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Back in New York, Lawrence went on painting and became depressed. In 1949 he admitted himself to Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he stayed for eleven months. He painted there, and the resulting Hospital Series is unlike the rest of his work in attending to the emotional states of the patients around him.

Struggle, teaching, and the children's books, 1954–1970

Between 1954 and 1956 Lawrence painted Struggle: From the History of the American People, thirty panels covering the years 1775 to 1817. He had planned sixty and stopped halfway. Instead of giving the panels titles he labeled each one with a quotation, and the choices are pointed.

For the panel on Patrick Henry he took a less familiar line from the same speech: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery." A panel showing a slave revolt carries the words of a man who sued for his freedom in 1773: "We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!" The series also reaches subjects rarely painted, among them Margaret Cochran Corbin in combat and the wall built by enslaved workers that protected the American position at the Battle of New Orleans.

No museum bought the series in the political climate of the mid-1950s. The panels went instead to a private collector, who sold them on one by one. Three of them, panels 14, 20 and 29, have never been found, and three others were traced in 2017, 2020 and 2021. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, gathered the surviving panels for an exhibition that opened in January 2020 and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Phillips Collection.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted a retrospective in 1960. Lawrence taught at the New School for Social Research, the Art Students League, Pratt Institute and the Skowhegan School during these years. In 1969 he was one of about two hundred Black artists in a show sponsored by the Philadelphia School District and the Pennsylvania Civic Center Museum.

He also worked for children. Harriet and the Promised Land, published in 1968, used the paintings from his Harriet Tubman series, and The New York Times listed it among the year's best illustrated books. Two more volumes followed, drawn from the John Brown and Migration series. In 1970 he illustrated eighteen of Aesop's Fables for Windmill Press, and the University of Washington Press published his full set of twenty-three in 1998.

Seattle and the University of Washington, 1970–1999

Lawrence arrived at the University of Washington in Seattle as a visiting artist in 1970 and was professor of art there from 1971 to 1986. He and Gwendolyn Knight settled in the city. Among his graduate students was the lithographer and abstract painter James Claussen.

Soon after the move he painted five pictures on the westward journey of George Washington Bush, an African American pioneer who settled in the Pacific Northwest; they belong to the State of Washington History Museum. In 1980 he finished Exploration, a mural of porcelain on steel forty feet long in twelve panels, installed in the Blackburn Center at Howard University.

Asked to illustrate a new edition of a book of his own choosing, Lawrence chose John Hersey's Hiroshima of 1946 and made eight screen prints in 1983, showing survivors at the moment of the bombing. The University of Washington commissioned the painting Theater in 1985 for the main lobby of Meany Hall for the Performing Arts. In the early 1990s he painted Events in the Life of Harold Washington for the Harold Washington Library in Chicago.

The Whitney Museum of American Art surveyed his whole career in 1974 and the Seattle Art Museum did the same in 1986. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1990 and the Washington Medal of Merit, the state's highest honor, in 1998. In 1999 Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight set up the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, which holds their estates and supports the study of American art, with an emphasis on work by African American artists.

How Jacob Lawrence painted

Lawrence used water-based paint for his whole career, most often casein tempera on hardboard panels prepared with a gesso ground. Tempera dries quickly and will not blend once it is on the board, and the pictures show it. Shapes are flat and unmodelled, edges are hard, and there is almost no shading to round a figure out.

The palette is short and applied in a fixed order. Working on a series, he set out every panel at once and carried a single color through all of them before mixing the next, starting with black and working towards the lighter tones. The effect is that sixty pictures read as one object: the same few reds, ochres and greens recur from panel to panel, and no scene drifts away from the others in tone.

Within those limits he built compositions out of repeated shapes. Rows of heads, stacked bundles, ladders, staircases and station platforms are arranged into patterns that carry the eye across the panel, and the figures deliver the meaning through posture and gesture rather than facial expression. Lawrence called the manner dynamic cubism, and he connected it both to the European movement and to the West African and Meso-American art the Cubists had drawn on.

The subjects came from Harlem and from African American history, and he worked in sets rather than single pictures from the start of his career. A series was planned as a whole before any paint went down: the sequence of events fixed first, then a short caption written for each panel. Gwendolyn Knight prepared the panels and worked with him on those captions.

for me, a painting should have three things: universality, clarity and strength. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good. Universality so that it may be understood by all men.

Reception and changing reputation

Recognition came early, and from inside Harlem first. Charles Alston wrote in 1938 that Lawrence had escaped both academic training and current fashion, and praised the color he got out of flat tempera. The Migration Series made him nationally known at twenty-three, and within a year Fortune, the Downtown Gallery and two major museums had all taken it up.

Reviewing a further set of thirty Harlem paintings in The New York Times in 1943, Howard Devree called the group "an amazing social document" and wrote that Lawrence had grown "in his use of rhythm as well as in sheer design and fluency." Devree also noted a strong semi-abstract approach and color he judged fitting for the subjects.

The path was not straight. Struggle found no museum buyer in the mid-1950s, was sold to a private collector and broken up panel by panel, and three of its thirty paintings are still missing. Honours accumulated later. The NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal in 1970. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1978 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, and received the National Medal of Arts in 1990. Eighteen institutions gave him honorary degrees, among them Harvard, Yale, Howard, Amherst and New York University.

A retrospective planned before his death opened at the Phillips Collection in May 2001 and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A catalogue raisonné of the paintings, drawings and murals appeared the same year. His last public commission, a mosaic in Murano glass called New York in Transit, was installed in the Times Square subway station in October 2001.

The market followed. The White House Historical Association bought The Builders, painted in 1947, for $2.5 million at auction in May 2007, and the picture has hung in the Green Room of the White House since 2009. In 2018 The Businessmen sold for $6.1 million. His obituary in The New York Times called him "one of America's leading modern figurative painters" and "among the most impassioned visual chroniclers of the African-American experience."

Death in Seattle, June 2000

Jacob Lawrence died of lung cancer on 9 June 2000, in Seattle. He was eighty-two, and he had gone on painting until a few weeks before his death.

Gwendolyn Knight outlived him by five years and died in 2005, aged ninety-one. The foundation Lawrence and Knight set up in 1999 holds both estates and keeps a searchable archive of close to a thousand images of their work.

Two awards carry his name. The Seattle Art Museum gives the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, worth $10,000, to artists and scholars whose work reflects the concerns of the two painters. The Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington School of Art runs an annual residency.