Jacob Lawrence’s portraits of America

By Y.F. | SALEM

BY THE MID-20TH century Jacob Lawrence was one of the most celebrated artists in America. In a style described as “dynamic cubism”, he captured the joys and difficulties of the African-American experience and painted portraits of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a key figure in the Haitian revolution, as well as of the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In 1940, aged only 23, he created his acclaimed “Migration” series: the story of the “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the rural South to the cities of the north, told across 60 panels. It earned him his first major solo exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1949 Lawrence sought a new project. He began visiting the New York Public Library, mining the archives for letters, diaries, public speeches, legal petitions and military reports that might spark an idea. After five years of research, he decided that he would reimagine the history of America itself. “I gradually began to appreciate not only the struggles of the Negro people, but also to appreciate the rich and exciting story of America and of all the peoples who emigrated to the ‘New World’ and contributed to the creation of the United States,” he said. The new work would “depict the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy”. The result was the 30-strong “Struggle” series, completed in 1956.