<p>The 60 paintings in Jacob Lawrence's great Migration series
present piercing images of the African-American experience
</p>
<p>By Robert Hughes
</p>
<p> The show of all 60 paintings of Jacob Lawrence's Migration
series, at the Phillips Collection in Washington, is an event
that no one interested in African-American cultural history--or, in a wider way, the story of American painting as a whole--could pass up. The works haven't been shown in two decades,
but they constitute the first, and arguably still the best,
treatment of black-American historical experience by a black
artist. (Romare Bearden's collages are slices of life, but they
do not form an explicit historical narrative in the way that
Lawrence's paintings do.)
</p>
<p> Fifty years have passed since Lawrence made these little pictures,
on store-bought panels in his Harlem studio; and they are of
far greater power than almost all the acreage of WPA murals
that preceded them in the 1930s. They were almost immediately
bought, half by the Phillips Collection and half by the Museum
of Modern Art in New York City, and were in fact the first paintings
by a black artist to enter MOMA's collection. It seemed to both
Alfred Barr of MOMA and Duncan Phillips that Lawrence's series
represented a unique conjunction of black experience, history
painting and a modernist idiom. They were right. From Benjamin
West to Robert Rauschenberg, American art is sown with attempts,
varying between utter bathos and success, to image forth the
American story. And for reasons that are lamentably obvious,
practically none of these were created by blacks, until Lawrence
appeared.
</p>
<p> Younger than the painters and writers who took part in the Harlem
Renaissance of the '20s, Lawrence was also at an angle to them:
he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive
images of blacks--the Noble Negroes in Art Deco drag--that
others tended to produce as an antidote to the vile stereotypes
with which white popular art had flooded the culture since Reconstruction.
Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural
milieu--in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a
Harvard-trained aesthete who believed strongly in the possibility
of an art created by blacks that could speak explicitly to the
African-American community and still embody the values of modernism.
Or, in Locke's words: "There is in truly great art no essential
conflict between racial or national traits and universal human
values."
</p>
<p> If Lawrence's series delivers a rebuke to current fictions of
cultural separatism--"It's a black thing; you wouldn't understand"--so does its encouragement by New York's liberal white culture;
it is worth remembering (and is documented at some length in
the Phillips catalog) that the Migration series could not have
been done without several grants from the Rosenwald Fund, instigated
by Locke, and might never have acquired a public life without
the determined backing of the art dealer Edith Halpert.
</p>
<p> What are the paintings about? A huge subject, which no artist
could touch and only an African-American one could have handled
with the depth of feeling it required. The migration of blacks
from the rural South to the industrial North, as it unfolded
in the first decades of the 20th century, had an epic character:
a collective Odyssey to match the Iliad of the Civil War. It
was forced by the merciless Southern white reaction that came
in the wake of Reconstruction, plunging the black population
of the Southern states--all poor, nearly all rural--into
a purgatory of abrogated rights.
</p>
<p> In the South, 1900-25 brought the high tide of Jim Crow laws,
of lynchings and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. Unable to
vote, powerless to change their political status, Southern blacks
voted with their feet, and by the end of the '30s more than
a million of them (the exact figures will probably never be
known) had flocked to mid-Atlantic, Northeastern and Midwestern
cities. They were looking for a better America than the one
they had known. Some of them no doubt imagined they were going
to a promised land; and in this they were sharply disappointed,
especially after 1929, when they arrived in a North economically
devastated by the Depression.
</p>
<p> But there was no way back. The South was drained of its black
proletariat, while the North acquired a new one, out of which
grew a radically altered conception of black culture: distinctively
urban but still Southern in its origins and collective memory.
This was the culture whose synthesis produced the Harlem Renaissance.
In it, American blacks reinvented themselves.
</p>
<p> Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917, Lawrence was schooled
in Harlem and grew up among migrants and their children. When,
years later, he told an interviewer that "I am the black community,"
he was neither bragging nor kidding. He trained as a painter
at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the public library's 135th
Street branch. Indeed the library itself, with its Schomburg
Collection, Manhattan's chief archive on African-American life
and history, was to shape his series: Lawrence did months of
painstaking research there to get the historical background
right, even though the final paintings rarely allude to specific
events. He took on the task with a youthful earnestness (he
was in his early 20s) that remains one of the most touching
aspects of the final work and goes far beyond mere self-expressiveness.
You sense that something is speaking through Lawrence.
</p>
<p> One of the remarkable things about the Migration series is the
language it does not use. Lawrence was not a propagandist. He
eschewed the caricatural apparatus of Popular Front, Social
Realist art, then at its peak in America. Considering the violence
and pathos of so much of his subject matter--prisons, deserted
communities, city slums, race riots, labor camps--his images
are restrained, and all the more piercing for their lack of
bombast. When he painted a lynching, for instance (No. 15),
he left out the dangling body and the jeering crowd: there is
only bare earth, a branch, an empty noose and the huddled lump
of a grieving woman. He set aside the Mexican-muralist influence
that lay so heavily on other artists who thought it was the
only way to commemorate the People; he wasn't painting murals,
but images closer in size to single pages, no more than 18 in.
by 12 in.
</p>
<p> Nevertheless, he imagined the paintings as integrally connected--a single work of art, no less united than a mural is, but
portable. Migration has the effect of a visual ballad, with
each painting a stanza: taut, compressed, pared down to the
barest requirements of narration. No. 10, They Were Very Poor,
takes the elements of a Southern sharecropper's life down to
the static minimum: a man and a woman staring at empty bowls
on a bare brown plane, an empty basket hung on the wall by an
enormous nail--the sort of nail you imagine in a crucifixion.
There isn't a trace of the sentimentality that coats Picasso's
Blue Period miserablisme.
</p>
<p> Lawrence called his style "dynamic Cubism," but although its
debt to late Cubism is obvious--the flat, sharp overlaps of
form, legible silhouettes and generally high degree of abstraction
in the color--it isn't notably dynamic; it tends to an Egyptian
stillness, friezelike even when you know the subject was in
motion, like the crowd surging into the narrow slot between
two railroad cars in No. 23, And the Migration Spread.
</p>
<p> Mainly (though some panels are weaker than others) the style
gives the pictures an infrangible gravity, as in No. 57, The
Female Worker Was Also One of the Last Groups to Leave the South,
with its single figure of a laundress in a white smock, stirring
a vat of fabrics--blue, black, yellow, pink--with her pole:
a dense and well-locked composition, suggesting the permanence
and resistance that form one of the underlying themes of Lawrence's
