JACOB LAWRENCE (1917- 2000) was precocious and prolific and his early critical success continued throughout his long life.

Yet, compared with his white US peers such as Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning, who has heard of him?

He was seven years old when his mother became a single parent and, after a few years in a foster home, he moved to Harlem with his mother and siblings where she earned her living as domestic help. The sights, sounds, dramas, joys and hardships of Harlem life would become the main subject of his paintings.

His talent was fostered as a child during the Harlem Renaissance when his people energetically seized and defined their own social, cultural, political and educational life, summed up by the activist historian W.E.B DuBois’s declaration: “Let us train ourselves to see the beauty in black.”

In an era when US mass culture denigrated Afro-Americans as bug-eyed simpletons, such black resistance gave the young working-class Lawrence a confidence and pride in his identity from which he blossomed intellectually and creatively.

At the age of 13, Lawrence attended Harlem’s Utopia Children’s House, an after-school community day-care programme where he studied arts and crafts with the influential black artist Charles Alston.

He was further educated in Afro-American history, sociology, politics and culture by attending public lectures at Harlem’s 135th street Public Library, where he could also research his own projects. Afro-American history and resistance to oppression became the second major theme of his work.  

Lawrence depicted Harlem’s street life with its shops, bars, diners and pool parlours buzzing with people, with some hanging out on the stoops of brownstone houses. Old men played chequers and gaggles of school children hurried to school.

Nor did he neglect to depict the hard work of the women domestic workers, like his mother, and of the carpenters and builders who sustained the community.

Using gouache — a medium which sings out the purity of its bright pigments — Lawrence juxtaposed the primary colours of red, yellow and blue against contrasting brown paper or more nuanced colours.

Inspired by modernist art, he simplified his forms but his silhouetted figures were based on his thorough grounding in life drawing, so that they clearly communicate meaning through anatomy, physiognomy and posture.

His strong sense of design produced clear but imaginative compositions, peopled by active citizens who affirm the energy of urban life in all its urgency.

In Ironers (1943) the raised shoulders, angled elbows and stooping postures of the three women workers powerfully convey the hard physical demands of repeatedly pressing the heavy, solid and hot irons onto the damp garments.

Yet the cheerful colours and decisive forms portray the daily life of his class and race in an essentially positive manner, without pity or favour.

Lawrence said that most of his paintings were of Harlem because “This is my genre. My surroundings. The people I know ... the happiness, tragedies and the sorrows of mankind as realised in the teeming black ghetto.”

But he also narrated the history of his people and the lives of its activists in several series of numbered images to which he added text. The Migration of the Negro [sic] from the deep South to the North (1941) tells the epic story of his own ancestry in 60 small paintings.

Toussaint L’Ouverture (1938) narrates the life of the Haitian revolutionary leader, while the series about the ex-slave activists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman are powerful affirmations of the Afro-American struggle for freedom.  

The imaginative compositions of these narratives shift from telling close-ups of individual experience to broad, filmic overviews of collective endeavour. In the 1960s, Lawrence depicted black student protests, their anger and defiance powerfully summed up in works including Wounded Man of 1968 and, in the 1980s, he expressed outrage at the US’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

Critical success came early with a well-received solo exhibition at the Harlem WMCA when Lawrence was 21 years old and his work was soon accepted in both white and black US cultural circles, so that he had numerous private gallery and museum exhibitions until his death at the age of 82.
 
But Lawrence never wavered from his principled, socially committed stance or from loyalty to his class and race. Nor did he succumb to the strong pressures to conform to the US’s dominant modernist aesthetic which ridiculed or denigrated figurative and especially narrative art from the mid-1940s onwards.

Aware of the artist’s social responsibility, Lawrence said: “I am part of the black community, so I am the black community speaking.”  His humane and non-assuming approach to art and to life enabled him to retain his integrity despite early and sustained critical success. No mean feat.