The Paintings of Jacob Lawrence
Sazerac posted the following piece on Jacob Lawrence, which I’m reblogging in its entirety; there are images below which are worth seeing, too:
“Why didn’t I learn about Jacob Lawrence in school?
He was given a $1,500 fellowship in 1940 to paint scenes from the Great Migration of blacks from the South. He used basic materials: primary colors of poster paints and small hardboard panels.
I caught the series today at The Phillips Collection in D.C. The scenes are beautiful, but I was most impressed with how well the 59 images and their terse captions combined to tell a bigger story.
11. Food had doubled in price because of the war.
“This was fat back … This was our salvation: we ate everything but the squeal,” Lawrence said in a 1992 interview.
31. The migrants found improved housing when they arrived North.
“My first consciousness of my physical environment came about when we made the move from Philadelphia to New York. I was 13 years of age, and I was seeing what I call tall buildings … And tall to me meant six stories high: tenements, fire escapes, and just blocks and blocks of geometric shapes … It wasn’t a shock, it was a revelation. I played in open fields. I played marbles … And here we arrive in New York, and kids were playing marbles in the gutters … on concrete and in between buildings … So there was this geometric kind of design throughout … It was like a dance, like a musical composition that appeared over and over and over again. And this is my response to the migrants facing the big urban community … I think it’s significant in formalistic terms in that it’s so different in the handling of content [from] other images throughout the series,” Lawrence said in a 1992 interview. (Crazy ellipses taken from the museum program)”
