By the time Jacob Lawrence arrived in Harlem, the party was over. The flush days of Harlem’s cultural renaissance had come to an abrupt end with the 1929 stock market crash and the beginning of the Depression.
Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, N.J., to a couple who had come north in the general migration of blacks out of the South, he found little he could count on in his early years.
By the time he was 13, his father was long gone. He and his younger brother and sister had spent three years in foster care before their mother could afford to send for them. She was a domestic with an irregular income, barely able to hold her family together.
Lawrence’s mother died in 1968, after he had become a major figure in the art world. “She was proud, but she would have been much happier if I’d had a job in the civil service,” he told me. “For people of her generation, security was everything.”
As a child new to the neighborhood, he was shocked by the lack of open space, the crush of humanity and the cramped verticality of the buildings. Because he neither played sports nor followed them, he wasn’t a big hit with his contemporaries. Nor was he especially drawn to school. He dropped out of high school to help his mother earn a living.
From these unpromising beginnings, he became one of the greatest figurative artists of the 20th century. When asked about what mattered in his youth, Lawrence was quick to give credit where it belongs: to Harlem’s black community. He didn’t mean only Harlem’s extraordinary grouping of painters, musicians, poets and playwrights who befriended him, but the ordinary people with whom he interacted every day.
His first Harlem break came right away. “My mother wanted me to be safe when I wasn’t at school, so she enrolled me in an arts and crafts program at Utopia House,” he said.
On the staff was painter Charles Alston, who recognized the young man’s drawing talent. Alston provided him with materials and some technical information, but let him build his painted, cutout cardboard cities on his own.
Lawrence continued to study with Alston, who became director of the Harlem Art Workshop funded by the Works Progress Administration Mural Project for the Federal Art Project.
Alston ran an intellectual salon. Through him, Lawrence met poet Langston Hughes, painter Aaron Douglas, writers Ralph Ellison and Claude McKay. Before Lawrence was out of his teens, McCay was hailing him as a “peerless delineator of the Harlem scene.”
Another important mentor was sculptor Augusta Savage. When Lawrence dropped out of high school to earn money, taking on a series of mind-numbing menial jobs, Savage tried to get him employment as a WPA artist. The first time she took him, he was too young. The following year, she brought him back to sign up.
“She was the first person to give me the idea of being an artist as a job,” he said. “I always wanted to be an artist, but I assumed I’d have to work in laundry or something of that nature.”
The heady company he kept encouraged his intellectual interests, and he spent many hours in the Harlem library, studying the history of African Americans, research that would result in his first great cycles of narrative paintings.
He also accompanied various mentors on trips to downtown galleries and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, eventually going by himself on foot, 60 blocks south of his home territory. While still a teenager, he developed an appreciation of early Renaissance art, the murals of Jose Orozco and the paintings of Arthur Dove, John Marin and Kathe Kollwitz.
I think of Lawrence whenever museums rise their admission fees. He remembered the MET being free. He wanted to go, and the Met let him in. (Robert Frost: Home is the place where, when you have to go there,They have to take you in.)
That’s why Tyler Green at MAN is right to disapprove of hikes at the gate (here and here) , and Judith H. Dobrzynski at Real Clear Arts is off base, here. Dobrzynski:
I argue that some may want to try variable pricing — charging people
more for various times. The Neue Galerie attempted to do this in 2006,
with the exhibition of Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” but
gave it up after public outcry about the $50 tickets. I’m sorry they
backtracked; I think they should have tried it, at least long enough to
assess its potential.
The potential? The potential damage of excluding people is far greater than potential increases to the bottom line.
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