Jacob Lawrence He was one of the most important artists of the XNUMXth century, widely recognized for his modernist depictions of everyday life, as well as for his epic tales of history and the African-American historical figures who underlined a vision of the work and struggle of the human being.
Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he was the son of immigrants who moved, along with millions of other African Americans, from the rural South to the urban and industrialized cities of the Midwest and Northeast during the mass relocation known as the Great Migration (1915-1950). Lawrence maintained that he was "a child of the Great Migration," which shaped the course of his own life and that of his fellow African-Americans.
In the previous decade, Harlem had experienced the period extraordinarily creative known as the Harlem Renaissance, and the neighborhood continued to be the central point of the african american culture.
The Businessmen, about 1940. Source: Amazon
Before he was twenty years old, Lawrence had developed a powerful and concise style that expressed all the vitality and pathos of the neighborhood and its occupants.
Lawrence became a nationally known figure virtually overnight when his series The Migration was shown in the Downtown Gallery de New York in 1941. The 24-year-old artist became the first African-American to be represented by a gallery of NY.
In turn, the magazine Fortune published a lengthy article on the series reproducing twenty-six of the sixty panels in the series, and the entire series was jointly purchased by the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection.
Later, and despite his success, Lawrence was drafted into the Coast Guard during the Second World War and was assigned combat artist duty. After his discharge, he returned to Harlem and resumed painting vignettes of neighborhood life.
He was invited to teach at Black mountain college in 1946, the first of many teaching positions he would hold over the years. Lawrence received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to paint the Guerra series in 1946 and 1947, and in 1947 the magazine Fortune commissioned him to make ten paintings examining postwar conditions in southern United States. The next big series of his was Struggle: From the History of the American People, produced in 1955-56.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Lawrence's work was characterized by the stylistic experimentation and everyday imagery.
In the late 1960s, he returned to a simpler style and optimistic outlook. In 1971, Lawrence was offered a tenure teaching art position at the University of Washington, and he and his wife, the artist Gwendolyn Knight they moved to Seattle. Thematically, he concentrated on the theme of the builders.
Through his vivid and accessible visual storytelling, Lawrence presented the richness and complexity of African American history and culture both to their own community and to the rest of the world.