Jacob Lawrence
Struggle: From History of the American People
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA
Through April 26, 2020
(Click images for larger size)
One of my mantras when teaching or discussing is that how it
looks depends upon who is viewing it. Change the frame, you change the game.
In his lifetime, few African Americans were as acclaimed as Jacob
Lawrence (1917-2000). He grew up in Harlem and because he launched his
first major show when he was just 23, he is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance
even though it had faded by then. That’s just one of the many ways in which
black artists have been stuffed into convenient boxes. Call it a white frame.
Jacob Lawrence powerfully depicted the conditions of black folks, but he was also
an American artist. Like many people of color, he was at his incisive
best when he challenged America to live up to its own ideals.
Between 1949-54, Lawrence spent a lot of time at the New
York Public Library, where he researched American history and looked at how it
was illustrated in textbooks. He finished his tasks in the same year the
Supreme Court ordered school desegregation in its landmark Brown v. the
Board of Education decision. Lawrence began to paint his version of
history: 30 panels that focused on American history from the Revolutionary War
era through to the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. His paintings covered the big
events, but often from the perspective of individuals pushed to the margins:
slaves, Native Americans, and soldiers who marched behind those glorified in
textbooks. Change the frame and you change the game.
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem has reunited the
panels for the first time in 60 years–or at least most of them. Five panels are
either missing or too fragile to travel. By the 1950s, abstraction was all the
rage. Lawrence was affected by the movement, but his panels are a distinct
hybrid of a lot of things, including representationalism, cubism, and expressionism.
You won’t stand before them trying to figure out what you’re gazing upon. Instead,
something more profound is at work. The figures are recognizable as human
beings, but Lawrence did not paint them true to life because he wanted viewers
to focus upon other things. There is a theme that runs through the series and it
is painted red, a reminder that blood was shed. The burning question is, whose
blood?
The first panel (top) is of Patrick Henry exhorting a crowd
in ways reminiscent of John Calvin preaching from a high pulpit. He asks if
life and liberty must be purchased by slavery and chains. You will notice that
blood drips from a high, but upon whom is it falling? We need to talk about that.
Two panels later, we see a panel captioned “Rally Mohawks!” but these “Indians”
are white Sons of Liberty dumping tea into Boston Harbor–their disguise a sort
of red minstrelsy. Ah, but four of the six Iroquois tribes–one of which was the
Mohawks–fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution. And
why not? It was the colonists who warred on them, not the British Crown. 
Nor does Lawrence allow us to forget that slave blood is
part 
of the story of American struggle. The second panel takes a look at the Boston
Massacre. In legend, the first colonist to die was Cripus Attucks, a man of African
and Native American heritage. Panel 5 was inspired by a 1773 petition to
Massachusetts colony. A man known to us only as Felix was critical of fellow
African Americans willing to take up arms. He noted that his people had no
property, wives, city, or country.
Poor whites also come in for sympathy. His summer soldiers panel
depicts those who actually bore arms, not the rhetorical patriots that Thomas
Paine decried. They suffered badly for their patriotism. It was their blood
that flowed in pitched battles with Hessians. We get the sense that violence is
endemic in the white soul in Lawrence’s powerful; peek at the Aaron
Burr/Alexander Hamilton duel. Burr appears only in shadow, but with his gun
trained on the dying Hamilton. Blood again in the Battle of New Orleans, a
skirmish that actually too place after the peace treaty ending the War
of 1812 had been signed. Black blood is drawn in Lawrence’s look at an 1810
Georgia slave rebellion, and we know that Native blood will flow in his
concluding panel on west of the Appalachians expansion. (See below for these
two panels.)
This is simply an amazing collection. All of the action,
drama, and heroics associated with the birth of the United States is there.
Lawrence’s colors are bold, his figures vigorous, and the struggles intense. I
can do no better than to quote myself to end this review: Change the frame and
you change the game.
Rob Weir
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