Lawrence is known primarily for his series of panels on the lives of important African Americans in history and scenes of African American life. Lawrence felt that a single painting would not depict L'Ouverture's numerous achievements, and decided to produce a series of paintings on the general's life. Through the persistence of Augusta Savage, Lawrence was assigned to an easel project with the W.P.A., and still under the influence of Seifert, Lawrence became interested in the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the black revolutionary and founder of the Republic of Haiti. He also invited Lawrence to use his personal library, and to visit the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of African art in 1935.Īs the Depression continued, circumstances remained financially difficult for Lawrence and his family. Seifert encouraged Lawrence to visit the Schomburg Library in Harlem to read everything he could about African and African American culture. Lawrence enjoyed playing pool at the Harlem Y.M.C.A., where he met "Professor" Seifert, a black, self styled lecturer and historian who had collected a large library of African and African American literature. When Lawrence returned to Harlem he became associated with the Harlem Community Art Center directed by sculptor Augusta Savage, and began painting his earliest Harlem scenes. There he planted trees, drained swamps, and built dams. He enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal jobs program, and was sent to upstate New York. Lawrence dropped out of high school before his junior year to find odd jobs to help support his family. As the Depression became more acute, Lawrence's mother lost her job and the family had to go on welfare. 89, Lawrence enrolled in Commerce High School on West 65th Street and painted intermittently on his own. Shortly after he began attending classes at Utopia Children's Center, Lawrence developed an interest in drawing simple geometric patterns and making diorama type paintings from corrugated cardboard boxes. The center was operated at that time by painter Charles Alston who immediately recognized young Lawrence'stalents. He enrolled in Public School 89 located at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and at the Utopia Children's Center, a settlement house that provided an after school program in arts and crafts for Harlem children. Lawrence's parents separated when he was seven, and in 1924 his mother moved her children first to Philadelphia and then to Harlem when Jacob was twelve years old. The senior Lawrence worked as a railroad cook and in 1919 moved his family to Easton, Pennsylvania, where he sought work as a coal miner. He was the eldest child of Jacob and Rosa Lee Lawrence. Lawrence was born on September 7, 1917,* in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Moreover, Lawrence is one of the few painters of his generation who grew up in a black community, was taught primarily by black artists, and was influenced by black people. By the time he was thirty years old, Lawrence had been labeled as the "foremost Negro artist," and since that time his career has been a series of extraordinary accomplishments. Lawrence's paintings portray the lives and struggles of African Americans, and have found wide audiences due to their abstract, colorful style and universality of subject matter.
The most widely acclaimed African American artist of this century, and one of only several whose works are included in standard survey books on American art, Jacob Lawrence has enjoyed a successful career for more than fifty years.
"If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being." - Jacob Lawrence quoted in Ellen Harkins Wheat, Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938-40 (Hampton, Va.: Hampton University Museum Seattle: in association with University of Washington Press, 1991), n.p.
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