Exhibition Catalog | Jacob Lawrence

gradually expanded. He recalled initially not feeling the need to “go outside the
community except to an art gallery or a museum. Everything was right there.”⁷
Essential to his “everything” was the Arthur Schomburg collection in the Division of
Negro Literature, History, and Prints at the New York Public Library on 135th Street,
where he voraciously researched black history. In 1940 Lawrence met José Clemente
Orozco while the formidable muralist painted on site at the Museum of Modern Art.
He respected Orozco’s forceful draftsmanship and expressive figures, as well as his
commitment to addressing Mexico’s history of racial discrimination. Lawrence also
took inspiration from artists who had influenced Orozco. He learned effective uses of
the serial format from the great etcher of the Spanish Enlightenment, Francisco de
Goya, and he credited the sensitive portrayals of the human condition rendered by
French satirist and lithographer Honoré Daumier with influencing what he described
as the “humanistic” element of his work.⁸
While still in his twenties Lawrence earned fame and critical recognition
for projects demonstrating his belief that “the Negro has been one of the great . . .
focal points of this drama which we as Americans have experienced.”⁹ His brilliant
portrayals of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, whom he painted in 1939
and 1940, respectively, reflect his ability to both humanize and elevate the historical
figures he had heard about as a child from the “black school teachers and black
librarians” and the “street-corner orators” who taught him about history.¹⁰ Lawrence
revisited the subject of Tubman and the Underground Railroad in his series of paintings
Harriet and the Promised Land (1967), which is represented in the Kayden gift
by The Last Journey (fig. 8, cat. 9) and illuminated in this catalogue in an essay by
James T. Campbell. In 1941 Lawrence completed one of his most famous works, the
sixty-panel series The Migration of the Negro. He immediately followed it with twentytwo
gouache paintings titled The Legend of John Brown, which illustrate the beliefs
and deeds of the radical, white abolitionist with a spare, abstract style. The Kayden
gift features the complete portfolio of twenty-two stunning silkscreen prints (cats.
19–40) Lawrence made in 1978 after the John Brown paintings. In all of these serial
narratives, the human form embodies the intentions and emotions of revolutionary
figures from African American—and hence American—history. These works prove
that the artist did not paint in the shadow of what W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903 had called
“double-consciousness,” a paradigm in which the self is divided into a black part and
an American part, and constantly pressured to choose between the two.¹¹ Lawrence’s
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