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BY CARROLL GREENE, JR.
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Courtesy: Terry Dintenfass Gallery.

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Jacob Lawrence cam from New Jersey to Harlem as a youngster in the 1920's. His mother wanted him off the streets, so she enrolled him in the Utopia Children's House, a settlement house, where he studied art after school.

Charles Alston, the Harlem Hospital muralist, then director of Boys' Work at Utopia, took an interest in the 13-year-old Lawrence and his painting. "Jake was a very serious kid," Alston recalls, "not full of mischief or athletically inclined." Lawrence himself remembers it this way: "Some kids had football, baseball, or basketball. I had painting."

Within a dozen years, Lawrence had become the most celebrated black painter of his century. His work was clearly stamped with the imprint of his times. The influence of the socially-conscious murals of the 1930's is evident; Lawrence himself acknowledges his artistic debt to the muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco. His major creation in that period was his Migration of the negro series of 60 narrative works that captured the plight of Negroes from the rural South to the urban Northeast, where many came to seek a better life during the hard days of the Depression.

Such work earned Lawrence a permanent place in this history of American art, as it did other painters striving for "social content" in their canvases. Yet Lawrence escaped the judgement rendered on some of his contemporaries who now are dismissed as having narrowly class-conscious. Today, in the words of one noted curator, "Lawrence is as good as he ever was."

If anything, his painting now reflects even greater depth and subtlety than in the past. But otherwise, it hasn't changed radically. It remains childlike (but not childish), joyfully colorful, and coherent. 

To this day Lawrence declines to use oils. In the settlement house where he first studied, more mundane vehicles such as water and egg white were provided for spreading pigments. "I guess I never use oils because my earliest experience was with watercolors, gouaches and tempera," Lawrence observes.

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Lawrence kept on painting through his teenage years. In 1937 he had to join a Civilian Conservation Corps work gang, where he made his living with a pick and shovel. But in 1939, he was invited to take part in the Federal Arts Project, the WPA program that promoted much of America's art, literature and theatre during the Depression.

By 1941, Lawrence had completed his Migration series, which won unusual public and critical attention; Fortune magazine, in its reproductions of 26 of the paintings in the series, exposed his work to a broad and, as it turned out, an appreciative audience of affluent businessmen.

Later, during World War II, he served as an artist-public relations man in the U.S. Coast Guard. A series of his narrative paintings on shipboard life was exhibited in 1944 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Other of his narrative series have dealt with such themes as the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution-and the Black Revolution. The art historian Oliver W. Larkin once wrote, of America, that "lest she forget the unfinished business of perfecting a democracy, Thomas Nast and Art Young have underlined her mistakes, and Jacob Lawrence has reminded her of John Brown..."

For all that, Lawrence has remained more the storyteller than the militant protester, more the compassionate observer than propagandist. Even during a hospital stay in which he was treated for a nervous breakdown in the late 1940s, he kept a lively interest in the people around him. His paintings titled Depression and Sedation came from his hospital experience.

Museums and private collectors have kept Lawrence much in demand. Both New York's Museum of Modern Art and Washington's Philips Gallery wished to aquire his first major series, the Migration works. Finally, after long negotiations, the institutions agreed to divide the 50 paintings equally, one taking the even-numbered canvases, the other the odd-numbered. Today, Lawrences are as sought after as ever; they fetch prices as high as $3,000 each.