Over the Line
dal 7/11/2001 al 3/2/2002
Segnalato da
7/11/2001
Over the Line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
"The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence" brings together more than two hundred paintings and drawings, representing Lawrence's most recognized themes and working methods.
Over a sixty-five year career,
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)
was an impassioned observer
and storyteller whose art
documented both the African
American experience as well as
the larger human struggle for
freedom and social justice. In
his gouache and tempera
compositions, he encapsulated
the life around him: the joy, the
suffering, the weakness, and
the strength of the people he
saw every day. Using bold,
dynamic patterning, unusual
angels of vision, and
sophisticated color
juxtapositions he created
socially conscious art free of
sentimentality and caricature.
While based on his own
experiences as an African
American, his art portrays the
universal quest for freedom,
social justice and human
indignity. For him, as he
remarked in 1969, the struggle
of African Americans is part of
the larger "struggle of man
always to better his conditions
and to move forward."The
exhibition, "Over the Line: The
Art and Life of Jacob
Lawrence," brings together
more than two hundred
paintings and drawings,
representing Lawrence's most
recognized themes and
working methods.
Many of the paintings on view
offer detailed pictorial accounts
of the sidewalks, streets,
brothels, and pool halls of
Harlem. Lawrence recorded the
raucous vitality as well as the
unsavory details of Harlem
social life. Drawing on the
language of pattern, repetition,
and rhythm, he brought
attention to Harlem subjects
that had hitherto been
reserved for poets, writers, and
photographers. Lawrence
effectively translated to an
audience outside Harlem the
compelling cadences and
explosive movements of life
above 125th Street.
Lawrence’s mastery of abstract
compositional rhythms would
become the hallmark of his
mature art.
The most characteristic feature
of Lawrence’s earliest work
was his use of multiple panels,
each accompanied by a
narrative caption. His earliest
narratives focused on
individual African American
heroes and heroines: Frederick
Douglass, John Brown, and
Harriet Tubman, and the
Haitian slave turned
revolutionary Toussaint
L’Ouverture. In 1940, he turned
from individual sagas to a
collective one, the Migration of
the Negro, telling the story in
60 panels of the Great
Migration of African Americans
from the South to the North
from 1916 through the
twenties. As in his previous
series, Lawrence adopted the
tempo and pulse of folktales to
create a visual analogue to the
African American oral tradition.
The fourteen panels that
constitute the War series differ
from his earlier historic cycles in
relying solely on images rather
than on the conjunction of
words and text. The result is
less a narrative cycle than a
sequence of self-contained
canvases bound together by
mood and subject. This
technique of working on a cycle
of paintings related to a single
theme would henceforth
become Lawrence’s favored
format.
Lawrence produced eleven
paintings during a nine-month
stay in 1949 at the Hillside
Hospital, an institution for
psychiatric treatment in
Queens. They offer penetrating
insight into the circumstances of
mental illness and therapy, from
the patients’ absorption in the
occupational therapies of
weaving and gardening to the
listlessness of the depressed.
During the 1950s,
notwithstanding the rise of
Abstract Expressionism and its
rejection of recognizable
imagery, Lawrence’s work
remained figural. He turned,
however, to increasingly edgy,
fractured geometries and
surrealist inversions of scale in
compositions that skirt the edge
of abstraction. His paintings on
the theme of performer and the
world of masks suggest his
preoccupation with creative
introspection, illusion, and the
universality of performance,
whether on stage or with a cue
or cards.
In 1964, he sold his apartment
in New York and moved to
Lagos, Nigeria. The works he
produced during his
eight-month stay there contain
a new decorative freedom and
panoramic liveliness. Lawrence
retained this more decorative
mode after his return to the
United States, but shifted his
subject matter. He began a
series of paintings on the theme
of the builder, many of which
include African and Caucasian
Americans working together.
Emerging from his positive
views of the human condition
and the power of the human
spirit to overcome obstacles,
the subject symbolized, as he
said, "man’s aspiration, as a
constructive tool--man
building." This theme continued
in his work until the end of his
career.
Image: Beggar No. 1 [Aka "Blind Beggars"], 1938 Tempera on Composition Board, 20 x 15 in. (50.8 x 38.1 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of New York City W.P.A., 1943, 43.47.28
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