2/28/20

Jacob Lawrence Changed the Frame of How We Look at History


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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