Exhibition Catalog | Jacob Lawrence

NEMEROV
into one form and then another, his guises and self-creations infinite, because “he can
take the forms / of all the beasts, and water, and blinding fire.”²
Lawrence was a protean figure. By 1963, he knew this—if he ever doubted
it. More than a quarter century of steady and endlessly creative work predated Fish
Market. You might say he had done the work of five men. Where it all came from, how
it emerged, was not so much a mystery to him, I suspect, as a source of pleasure and
fantasy, the oceanic dream of a person who by the tilt of his head might crack open his
skull again and again to let the bright things emerge. The wonder and pleasure of it was
that the stuff kept coming, so much so that sometimes, as in this picture, it required
a checklist—a portfolio of vignettes—just to keep pleasurable track of all the weird,
swimming fantasies that one’s lines and nets at the merest drop into the water could
not help but pull up.
That Lawrence’s artistic process might well have been more difficult, less
miraculous, is beside the point. Fish Market is a fantasy of ceaseless plentitude that’s
true to an artist’s wonder when he really takes stock, surveys what he’s found, and discovers
himself amazed by the great scope of what’s out there—amazed that the bright
things should brim to overflowing with a voyaging intent to plow the oceans straight
to him. The counter and the crushed ice are just the stage for this protean flow that consents
to be so arrayed but that flows and circulates according to other rules. What we
see is the dream of immortal access to an infinite slippery beauty, a Piscean pantheon.
At the end of his life, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called “The Circus
Animals’ Desertion” about the disappearance of his muses, his ideas, the circus animals.
Lawrence, in the middle of his long career, felt no such drying up. In Fish Market,
the exotic beasts keep flowing, each one stranger than the last, a glittering menagerie
that the artist, in his mind, keeps dizzying track of even as he spins the next one out.
Only he can imagine each work as an exotic creature, only he can portray himself surrounded
in the never-ending circuit of all the depth he raises.
1. Elizabeth A. Honig, Painting & the Market in Early Modern
Antwerp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 82–88.
2. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York:
Anchor, 1963), 65.
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