Lot 59
  • 59

Jacob Lawrence 1917-2000

Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 USD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Jacob Lawrence
  • Migration
  • signed Jacob Lawrence and dated 1947, l.r.
  • egg tempera on board
  • 20 by 24 in.
  • (50.8 by 61.0 cm)

Provenance

The Downtown Gallery , New York
Private collection, 1947 (acquired from the above)
By descent in the family to the present owner

Exhibited

Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago, Fifty-Ninth Annual American Exhibition Water Colors and Drawings, 1948 (Norman Wait Harris Silver Medal Prize)

Literature

Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings and Murals (1935-1999), A Catalogue Raisonné, Seattle, Washington, 2000, no. P47-17, p. 105, illustrated

Condition

Very good condition; a few pindots of flaking, a centimeter size thin scratch in upper right, some frame abrasion to left edge, under UV: fine.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

Born in New Jersey, Jacob Lawrence moved to Harlem in 1930 at the age of thirteen during an era characterized by both the turmoil of the Great Depression and the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance.  By this time, Harlem was its own city, a bustling community north of Manhattan's center, home to thousands of displaced African Americans.  Many members of the community had relocated there from rural areas in the south during the 'Great Migration,' a northward exodus in the 1910s and 1920s of nearly one million blacks in search of a better life. While these recent transplants, including Jacob Lawrence and his mother, suffered economic hardships and cramped living quarters, they were exposed to a new kind of African-American culture. The presence of elite lawyers, doctors, businessmen, intellectuals, authors, musicians and artists created a rarefied atmosphere of optimism and an unprecedented desire for freedom of expression. At the same time, new cultural resources blossomed in the community, including the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) and the Harlem Art Workshop.  It is in the context of this Harlem, this era of possibility, that Jacob Lawrence began his artistic career.
 
Though he is largely credited as being self-taught, Lawrence received some formal training under muralist Charles Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop.   Alston famously proclaimed that "to teach Jake was to limit him."  Lawrence invented his own stylistic vernacular to communicate his African-American narratives.  Characterized by bold silhouettes, overlapping forms, cubist angles, and bright, often primary colors, his style was classified alternately as "primitive" and "modern." Lawrence resented the term primitive. He referred to his own style as "dynamic cubism," noting that his work was "abstract in the sense of being designed and composed" and expressionistic in its subject matter.  Though his compositions were not spontaneous, they were in fact reactions to what was going on around him, and the result of a meticulous and deliberate intellectual process. Lawrence consciously organized the composition and layering, placing shapes and colors into his picture planes to express the complexities of the world of black culture. Robert Hughes writes, "Lawrence was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks, the Noble Negroes in Art Deco guise-that tended to be produced as an antidote to the toxic racist stereotypes with which white popular culture had flooded America since Reconstruction.... He gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu-in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard-trained esthete (and America's first black Rhodes scholar) who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks which would speak explicitly to African-Americans yet still embody the values, and self-critical powers of modernism" (American Visions, p. 455).

In 1941, encouraged by Locke, Lawrence painted 'The Migration Series,' chronicling the massive movement of American blacks, according to Locke, "not only from countryside to city, but from medieval to modern."  Lawrence produced sixty small works, each titled individually, and accompanied by Lawrence's own caption based on the painstaking research he had conducted in the Schomburg Collection at the Library.  This critically acclaimed series catapulted Lawrence into the art world's elite milieu.

In 1947,Walker Evans, editor of Fortune Magazine and a famed photographer noted for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression, commissioned Lawrence to create a series of paintings for a piece Walker was writing titled "In the Heart of the Black Belt."  Walker's article, and Lawrence's accompanying images were intended to depict the lives of African- Americans still living in the South.  Lawrence accepted the commission and created ten major temperas, three of which were illustrated in the August 1948 issue of Fortune.

To prepare for this series, Lawrence traveled through the South during the months of June and July 1947.  He later observed: "Most of my time was spent in the Mississippi Delta where cotton is still king and where Negroes outnumber whites everywhere and in some areas as much as two to one.  For outnumbering the whites, the Negro pays dearly.  He is denied first class citizenship, and civil liberties are the properties of white men.  A few Negroes have attained affluence by submitting to and using the feudal tradition of the South.  A small minority are even upholding this tradition for the uncertainties it affords them.  But there are other Negroes - teachers, lawyers, social scientists, farmers, and social workers - who are working hard to obtain equality of economic, educational and social status, which has been denied several millions of Negroes for over three hundred years.  These are the men and women who are optimistic, and rightfully so, concerning the Negroes' future not only in the South but in the United States" (Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, vol. 2, p. 105).

Migration, one of the ten paintings Lawrence produced for this series, reprised the subject for which the artist was best known and was exhibited at Edith Halpert's influential The Downtown Gallery, where Lawrence was the only African-American artist represented.  The artist's caption accompanied the painting:  "Newer farm machinery that can do the work of many hands, along with racial disturbances, are the causes of a perennial migration of the southern Negro from rural to urban communities within the south and from southern to northern communities within the country" (Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, vol. 2, p. 105).   Migration depicts a throng of men, women and children, arranged in a frieze-like composition, huddled with all of their worldly possessions. The bright colors and decorative patterning, particularly the beautiful flowered hat and 'Sunday best' of the elderly woman on the far right, are typical of Lawrence's mature style and according to the artist, a nod to the colorful way in which his mother decorated their Harlem tenement to bring cheer to their tight, dreary quarters.