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<strong>Lawrence</strong>’s Plenty ALEXANDER NEMEROV How does an artist imagine his whole body of work, his oeuvre? The artist makes and makes, he completes and completes, but what place in his mind do these finished works occupy? His creations are literal things, but they are also imagined: a succession of works, one after another, strung together in the mind’s eye of their maker, a mental catalogue of his creations. They are his private stock, an intimate gallery of mind-born creatures quite apart from any actual catalogue raisonné that might record their real location in place and time. <strong>Jacob</strong> <strong>Lawrence</strong>’s Fish Market, a watercolor from 1963, portrays such a personal inventory (fig. 10, cat. 7). The heart of <strong>Lawrence</strong>’s fish market is the center, where three men shuck shellfish. Elbow to elbow, seen from above, they use knives and fingers to pry open and scrape out clams. To either side, larger workers flank them. A man on the left, grimacing in a pool of black amid red spiny lobsters, holds out a tray of spiraling shellfish with his right hand while his left hand, octopus-like, steadies a scale pan suspended at the end of a long vertical tether. On the right, a much larger man holds three little fish in his extended right palm while with his left he shuffles a few more of these minnows on a big scale pan befitting his vast size. The big man, trailing a pool of black from his head, looks up to the right, averting his face from his hands. The five fishmongers make up the workmanlike core of <strong>Lawrence</strong>’s picture. Around them is the fruit of their production. Below is a display of exotic fish, striped and spotted, swimming as if in a simultaneous element of ocean water and crushed vendor’s ice. Though it is a tautology to say so, their colors and patterns are as bright and striking as a <strong>Lawrence</strong> painting. Appearing in five framed vignettes, they swim in a divided space. Consider the frame second from left, showing the sail-finned fish rising headfirst. The triangle of black at the upper right corner of the vignette, not to mention the thick black line along the right edge, makes the frame even appear to slide behind the blue and yellow vignette to the right, as if it were a picture disappearing behind another picture in a dealer’s rack. That blue and yellow FIGURE 10 <strong>Jacob</strong> <strong>Lawrence</strong>, Fish Market, 1963. Gouache, watercolor, and graphite on paper. Gift of Dr. Herbert J. Kayden and Family in memory of Dr. Gabrielle H. Reem, 2013.97 41