Jacob Lawrence :
Toussaint L'Ouverture and Legend of John Brown Series
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General Toussaint L'Overture, 1986 |
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November 15, 2008 — January 4, 2009
Opening Reception Saturday, November 22, 6 - 8 pm
Gallery Talk with Professor Patricia Hills, Sunday, December 14, 3 pm
Jacob Lawrence: Painting the African American Experience
Drawing on her book, Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence, Patricia Hills will speak on the art and life of Jacob Lawrence. For his art Lawrence drew on his own experiences and those of his Harlem community, including writers, poets and community activists, to paint a portrait of African American urban life during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. These experiences include African American history lessons, work for the government's Federal Art Projects, Jim Crow segregation in the South, and Civil Rights protests during the 1960s. In all of his work he stayed true to his humanist values by showing the good times and the often oppressive conditions, the struggles and the hopes.
Patricia Hills is Professor of Art History at Boston University. She has written books and exhibition catalogues on both 19th- and 20th-Century American Art, including Alice Neel, Stuart Davis, John Singer Sargent, May Stevens, and Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century. Her book Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence will be published by the University of California Press in September 2009.
About the Artist
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is best known for his depictions of the history and the struggles of African Americans. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he spent his early childhood in Pennsylvania, and, in 1930, at age 13, moved to Harlem and received training at community art centers and later worked for the easel project of the Works Progress Administration. A pride in his African American culture was instilled in him at this time as he was among such influential people of the Harlem Renaissance, as Romere Bearden, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. DuBois to name just a few. Lawrence made a name for himself at the young age of 24 with his “Great Migration” series, which documented the epic movement of African Americans from the rural South to the industrialized, urban North.
His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among many other leading museums around the country. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of Lawrence’s work in 1974. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983. Among the many other awards he has received are the National Medal of the Arts (1990) and honorary doctorates from Yale (1986) and Harvard (1995).
About the Exhibit
The Danforth Museum of Art is exhibiting two series of prints by Jacob Lawrence, which document the importance of the fight for freedom and the need for social protest from ordinary citizens to enact change.
One series, Toussaint L’Ouverture, comprises 15 prints which chronicle the liberation of Haiti in 1804 under the leadership of General Toussaint L’Ouverture. Born a slave, Toussaint emerged as the leader of the Haitian slave rebellion that freed his country from nearly 300 years of European rule.
The second series, entitled, The Legend of John Brown, recounts the events in John Brown’s personal struggle to abolish slavery. A fiery abolitionist, Brown became widely known for his militant tactics fighting proslavery forces in Kansas. His raid to steal guns from the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, resulted in his capture, trial, and conviction for treason.
Both series celebrate the bravery and personal sacrifice that these leaders endured to help change history. Expressed in Lawrence’s colorful, bold and dynamic style, the works still endure as testaments to the power of the artist as well as these important men in history.
The portraits of Jacob Lawrence and his artist-wife, Gwendolyn Knight, can be found in a concurrent exhibition Faith Ringgold: Story Quilts (specifically in the work, Les Café des Artistes (1994)).
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Abstract for Patricia Hills,
Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence
Painting Harlem Modern offers a variety of readings of the art of Jacob Lawrence within a context that includes his own experiences and the complex interaction of events, of the visual and oral culture of Harlem, and of artists, writers, educators, and radical activists concerned with the same issues of race, art, and modernity in the middle years of the 20th century.
The Introduction sketches out the discourses of modernity in the first half of the 20th Century. Chapters 1 and 2 of Part I describe the 1930s Harlem environment of people and institutions that nurtured Lawrence and other young artists and suggest their impact on his development as an emerging artist and visual spokesperson for his community.
Part II then develops interpretations of separate themes and iconographies in Lawrence’s art as the decades passed from the Depression era of the 1930s, to World War II of the 1940s, the Cold War of the 1950s, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. During these years Lawrence’s style continued to be an expressive cubism, but it became more nuanced as his experiences of life and art deepened. The simple scenes of his youth gave way to the more sophisticated imagery of his series, including Toussaint L’Ouverture, Harriet Tubman, and The Migration of the Negro, discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 5 focuses on his travels in the South during the 1940s that expanded his awareness of Jim Crow segregation and its brutalities; his response to racism and lynchings became both more subtle and more explicit. Chapter 6 addresses his life in Harlem and his appreciation of home, street life, and the cultural geography of community.
In 1949, when he was 31 years old and being heralded as the foremost African American artist, Lawrence experienced a mental breakdown and voluntarily entered the psychiatric ward of Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York. His extended stays at Hillside lasted just over a year, and he emerged with a greater understanding of the intersection of the self, sociology and symbolic thinking, which he translated into complex pictorial iconographies on the themes of masks and masking; see Chapter 7. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s he returned to the issues of segregation, injustice, and civic protest. His moral compass helped provide guidance to his artistic responses; see Chapter 8.
An Epilogue provides a bookend to his career, with a brief discussion of the effect on his art of his move to Seattle in 1970, his relationship to his wife and partner of many years, Gwendolyn Knight, and an assessment of his stature in twentieth-century art history.
Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence,
Copyright © 2008 Patricia Hills. All rights reserved.
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