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Jacob Lawrence [1917 – 2000]. The Migration Series, No 57 c. 1940 - 1941. Jacob Lawrence is regarded as one of the masters of African-American art. Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
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Jacob Lawrence[1917 – 2000] The Migration Series, No 57 c. 1940 - 1941
Jacob Lawrence is regarded as one of the masters of African-American art.
Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. • When his parents separated, Lawrence and his siblings moved with their mother first to Pennsylvania and eventually to Harlem. • To keep her young son busy, Rose Lawrence enrolled young Jacob in art classes, where he showed early promise.
Both she and the artist’s father had “come up”—a phrase used to indicate one of the most important events in African American history since Reconstruction: • The migration of African Americans out of the rural South.
This exodus was gathering strength at the time of World War I, and fundamentally altered the ethnic mix of New York City and great industrial centers such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.
In the late 1930s, the American artist Jacob Lawrence began producing extended narratives composed of multiple small paintings that were based on history or biography.
Lawrence started "The Migration of the Negro" -- that's the complete original title of his series -- in 1940, when he was 22. • He was born in New Jersey to parents who'd recently left the South, had grown up in Pennsylvania and had lived in Harlem since his early teens.
He settled with his mother and two siblings in Harlem at age thirteen. • Harlem in the 1920s was rich in talent and creativity, and young Jacob, encouraged by well-known painter Charles Alston and sculptor Augusta Savage, dared to hope he could earn his living as an artist.
One of his first mentors was African-American sculptor Augusta Savage, who continued to guide his career in later years.
Augusta Savage, born Augusta Christine Fells (February 29, 1892 – March 26, 1962) was an African-Americansculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. • She was also a teacher and her studio was important to the careers of a rising generation of artists who would become nationally known. • She worked for equal rights for African Americans in the arts.
She was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida. • She began making clay figures as a child, mostly small animals, but her father would beat her when he found her sculptures. • This was because at that time, he believed her sculpture to be a sinful practice, based upon his interpretation of the "graven images" portion of the Bible. • After the family moved to West Palm Beach, she sculpted a Virgin Mary figure, and, upon seeing it, her father changed his mind, regretting his past actions. • The principal of her new school recognized and encouraged her talent, and paid her one dollar a day to teach modeling during her senior year. • This began a life-long commitment to teaching as well as to art.
“She [Augusta] was the first person to give me the idea of being an artist as a job,” Lawrence later recounted. • “I always wanted to be an artist, but assumed I’d have to work in a laundry or something of that nature.”
Lawrence’s greatest inspiration came from the people and places of his Harlem neighborhood. Everything was open to his paintbrush—families, architecture, landmarks, even Harlem’s famous brownstones. • He was one of the artists who was a part of the Harlem Renaissance.
Although younger than most of the artists, Lawrence had a unique painting style and was determined to use his paintings as positive depictions of black life in America. • To further excel at his craft, Lawrence attended New York’s American Artists School from 1937 to 1939.
Lawrence noted that the 1930s in Harlem "was actually a wonderful period . . .although we didn't know this at the time. Of course it wasn't wonderful for our parents. For them, it was a struggle, but for the younger people coming along like myself, there was a real vitality in the community."
Just before World War II, Lawrence married fellow painter Gwendolyn Knight, also a student of Augusta Savage. • Knight would be his partner for decades to come. • The couple remained married until Lawrence’s death.
Lawrence was deeply confident in his identity as a black man, having been raised around other blacks who constantly affirmed his identity. • Yet Lawrence also knew that other blacks were suffering from the ravages of discrimination and racism. • He also was schooled in the history of Africans in America. Determined to meld his painting with his social awareness, Lawrence painted several series of works with different historical themes.
When he won a grant to paint the "Migration" pictures, Lawrence hadn't had much formal training and was barely launched on his career, though he'd been in contact with some of the artistic leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.
The subject of the migration occurred to him in the mid-1930s. • To prepare, Lawrence recalled anecdotes told by family and friends and spent months at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library researching historical events.
The 60 hardboard panels of "Migration," only 12 by 18 inches each, walk us through the flight of African Americans from the rural South around the time of World War I.
Lawrence frequently called his style “dynamic cubism.” • The dynamism is present in his use of vibrant colors and designs that resemble African-American quilts and textiles found in Africa. • The cubism is present in the flat, often angled layers of the subjects in his work.
“In order to add something to their lives, [black families] decorated their tenements and their homes in all of these colors..... It's only in retrospect that I realized I was surrounded by art. • You'd walk Seventh Avenue and took in the windows and you'd see all these colors in the depths of the depression. All these colors.”
Lawrence used the same palate of colors throughout the whole series. • He did not mix colors. • By using these colors, it unifies not only the pictures, but also their theme.
He was the first visual artist to engage this important topic, and he envisioned his work in a form unique to him: • A painted and written narrative in the spirit of the West African griot—a professional poet renowned as a repository of tradition and history.
The Migration Series was painted in tempera paint on small boards (here, twelve by eighteen inches) prepared with a shiny white glue base called gesso that emerges on the surface as tiny, textured dots.
By far the most famous of these is The Migration Series (1941), a sequence of 60 paintings depicting the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and World War II—a development that had previously received little or no widespread attention.
Before he began painting, Lawrence spent months researching the subject and distilling it into short captions and preparatory drawings. • Then, with the help of his wife, the artist Gwendolyn Knight, he prepared 60 boards for the paintings.
He created the paintings in tempera, a type of water-base paint that dries rapidly. To keep the colors consistent, he applied one hue at a time to every painting where it was to appear, a feat of organization that required him to plan all 60 paintings in detail.
Lawrence, intent on constructing a seamless narrative, chose to work with a single hue at a time on all sixty panels. • He used drawings only as a guide, painted with colors straight from the jar, and enlivened his compositions with vigorous brushstrokes that help further the movement of the story.
The captions placed below each image are composed in a matter-of-fact tone; • They were written first and are an integral part of the work, not simply an explanation of the image.
Lawrence often described the migration as “people on the move,” and his series begins and ends with crowds of people at a train station (a potent symbol for growth and change in American history);
In the first panel, people stream away from the viewer through gates labeled “Chicago,” “New York,” and “St. Louis”;
In the last one, they face us, still and silent, behind an empty track. • The caption, which states, “And the migrants kept coming,” renders the message sent by the painting ambiguous and evocative. • Are the migrants leaving us, or have they just arrived? • What is our relationship to them?
