| |||||||||
|
 |
||||||||
 |
| The Education of Jacob Lawrence By Elizabeth Hutton Turner |
Notions of genius have eclipsed the question of Jacob Lawrence's education since the start of his career. James Porter's Modern Negro Art (1943) proclaimed Lawrence a virtuoso among popular painters. Porter credited Lawrence with childhood's gifts: "He sees the world anew for us. He has retained, from his age of innocence, that wholesomeness of comment that marks the effort of an unspoiled artist." Thus Lawrence was first described in a chapter along with Horace Pippin, a naïve artist who had invented his own way of painting. If this is an accurate characterization of Lawrence, it neatly deflects the question of his artistic education. According to Porter, "His teachers long ago agreed that he was an ‘original' and not to be cramped with formal exercises in drawing and painting."(1) Charles Alston confirmed, "I decided it would be a mistake to try to teach him."(2) Lawrence has never second-guessed this decision. He has stated, as a matter of fact, "I was not trained as a professional artist."(3) But does that also mean that he was self-taught? In telling his own story Lawrence emphasizes the lessons he learned from street preachers, Garveyites, Communists, and librarians, those people who fostered his view of the world and those who first bought and exhibited his work. He acknowledges the community in Harlem as an important source for his conviction to picture an untold story, for his desire to break through with his message that the life of his community was worthy of regard at a time when the commerce and acclaim of the New York art world itself was out of bounds to most African Americans.(4) Yet neither Lawrence's virtuosity nor his mandate as a popular artist can be completely reconciled with the facts of Lawrence's training, that is to say, how he learned to paint. Lawrence was not a naïve artist, and in fact the story of his training is well known. His teacher was named Charles Alston. From 1934 to 1937 he attended Alston's Works Progress Administration (WPA) sponsored workshop at 306 West 141st Street, where he depicted street scenes on brown paper. Lawrence also received a scholarship to attend the American Artists School in 1937, the year he began work on his first history series. Last in this list of educational opportunities is the fact that Lawrence rented a corner in the studio shared by Alston and Henry Bannarn and there was open to mentoring until the time of his preparation to paint The Migration of the Negro series and his first Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship in 1940. Even though Alston said that he did not teach Lawrence, a bond developed between the younger artist and his teacher. Alston, in fact, considered Lawrence like "a son."(5) It was Alston who wrote the introduction for the brochure accompanying Lawrence's first one-man show at the YMCA and Alston who introduced him to Alain Locke, thereby paving the way to the dealer Edith Halpert and the larger New York art world. For his part, Lawrence must have felt he was gaining something from Alston's teaching methods to have allied himself with those particular workshops for the better part of a decade. This essay will explore what Lawrence learned. Jacob Lawrence's modernism did not come with his acceptance by the modern museum or by way of his promotion by a modern dealer. It arrived instead by way of the modernity of his education, even his proclaimed lack of professional training. Here an adage holds true: "Modern vision has two eyes."(6) One is the innocent eye that sees the world in a new way, à la Baudelaire. This quality of radical invention, which surely cannot be taught, corroborates Porter's and Alston's remarks and affirms the innate source of Lawrence's artistic genius. Yet we must look to the metaphysics of teaching (the values, beliefs, activities, examples, and choices to which Lawrence was exposed while he was learning to become an artist) to find out how he became an artist in the modern world. The theories and practices of modern pedagogy to which Lawrence was exposed assure the role of the second eye. This educated eye was trained to see the logic, the structure, the boundaries of the picture plane. This eye was strengthened by the principles of design, a grammar of gridded space embodying the language of vision. This eye surely enabled Lawrence to bridge the great currents of abstraction and representation with his powerfully expressive patterns. In 1930 art was not contemplated as a career for the young Jacob Lawrence; art was an escape from the unwanted confinements of tenement and street in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, where the only playgrounds were sidewalks lined with speakeasies and gambling houses, pool rooms and dance halls.(7) As if joining the Cub Scouts or going on a hike, Lawrence chose art from among programs offered by the local settlement house. As Lawrence said, "It was something I just liked to do."(8) His earliest art experiences were informed by cutting-edge pedagogical theories recently espoused at Columbia University Teachers College. It was James Wells (B.A., Columbia, 1925), then a faculty member at Howard University, who established the arts and crafts program of Utopia Children's House, which Lawrence attended. Wells sought to make the art-making process less formidable. Picture the arts and crafts center as the Harmon Foundation photographer found it in 1933 (fig. 23). Wells is in the background, not positioned in the traditional academic orientation at the head of the class. It is not a studio but a workshop. There are tables and desks, not easels. The activities are not restricted to painting. Participation means play or experimentation with available materials.(9) Lawrence recalls that he tried soap carving, leatherwork, and woodwork as well as painting.(10) Of this initial exposure Lawrence has commented, "I didn't realize it was even art at the time."(11) Lawrence remembers Charles Alston, not Wells, as his teacher.(12) Under Alston's supervision, the workshop functioned much as it had done under Wells. Alston considered Lawrence "not the usual mischievous, hell-raising kid.… Jake was always a grave little kid."(13) The seventeen-year-old Lawrence seemed mature, independent. He asked his teacher not what to do, but how to do it. "That's where I helped him," Alston said.(14) In this Alston was following the teachings of John Dewey, whose philosophy was widely read at Columbia, where he taught for many years. Dewey advocated that the student lead the way into an experience and that the teacher's lesson follow. Learning comes from seeing and doing, doing and undergoing.(15) Alston did not teach Lawrence to draw, but when he found Lawrence drawing masks, Alston showed him how to make life-size ones out of papier-mâché.(16) The exercise supplied more than materials and yielded more than masks. Fantasy assumed tangible form. Though the masks themselves have been lost–the papier-mâché long since faded and crumbled–the faces depicted in Lawrence's earliest known paintings retained the device as well as the intent of Alston's lesson: Art is not description; art comes from inside, from perception, from emotion, from imagination. This understanding provides the basis for what Columbia Professor Thomas Munro, a colleague of Dewey's, called "a selective and reconstructing eye."(17) When the tempera paints on the workshop table carried Lawrence's inclinations further into painting, Alston next showed him how to take charge of the picture plane. Lawrence recalled the activity as "making designs with rugs." Such exercises in form and image structure were widely known, particularly at Columbia Teachers College, through a textbook entitled Composition, published in 1899 by Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow had been chairman of the Fine Arts program at Columbia University Teachers College from 1904 until his death in 1922. Dow's Composition had been the first text of its kind to provide popular access to ordinary artistic practices. Dow ignored traditional distinctions between fine art and decoration, finding the same principles of design in both categories. His examples put ideas of form and aesthetics within reach of everyday experience. Composition recommended, "Copying a part or the whole of some good rug–in line and color–is the best way to become acquainted with space, motives and quality. Then design a rug with border and centre, the shapes to be pure inventions or symbols."(18) Following Dow's method, instead of teaching figure studies and other techniques of the academy, Alston taught objective or nonrepresentational drawing. Instead of passive description of the exterior world, Lawrence, following Alston, attended to the surface of the artwork. The preestablished compositions of rugs functioned as templates. By copying them Lawrence was plotting the rectangle, mapping the space, becoming aware of all pictures as compositional structures. As Dewey, once Dow's colleague at Columbia, said, "Art does not create the forms; it is their selection and organization in such ways as to enhance, prolong and purify the perceptual experience."(19) By reframing the designs, by recutting the space, by changing the orientation of the border, Lawrence's eye became attuned to visual relationships as well as his own predilections for certain shapes. Within the frame were experiences in pure pattern–using shapes he had liked or invented–seeing them in relation to each other–in repetition, alternation, and symmetry. "I think I like to put things against things and see them work. I think that's it. And seeing the entire picture plane as a whole and seeing one thing, how it reacts against something else, and the push, the pull of things," Lawrence has said.(20) Pattern had a powerful hold over the young Lawrence. Some say he was so obsessed that it led to his seeing pattern everywhere: doors, windows, fire escapes, subway tiles.(21) Such was the intent of Alston's lesson. And such was the experience of Frank Lloyd Wright who having been taught as a child first to draw geometric shapes remarked, "I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw."(22) Wright himself recognized a connection with Lawrence, once telling the Downtown Gallery, "He would make a good architect."(23) By equating design with decoration, Alston's lesson provided Lawrence with a broad definition of art, one that elided the question of class. Poverty was not a barrier to art if he could find it inside himself or somewhere in his neighborhood. Pride walked hand in hand with this idea. Once when asked whether there was talent in his family, Lawrence replied, "it expressed itself with colored rugs and pattern and that type of thing. You see? So I think the talent was expressed in that way, but not as painting, of course. As a way of living and decorating at home, I was surrounded by this as many of us were, and maybe this was a way that poor people have of getting some sort of beauty into their lives."(24) Later, when Lawrence had a studio of his own, he imposed on it a structured aesthetic similar to the one he found in patterns. "I have always liked a certain kind of structure that happens to be geometric. It's clean. To me, it has a cleanness about it, a neatness. Maybe that's it. A certain neatness. I keep my studio, try to keep my studio and home the same way.… And in teaching I emphasize this aspect."(25) Dewey would not have been surprised by Lawrence's delight in structure. As he explained, "It is not by accident that some objects and situations afford marked perceptual satisfactions; they do so because of their structural properties and relations… and an artist may utilize his deliberate awareness of them to create works of art that are more formal and abstract than those to which the public is accustomed."(26) Alston, like most students at Teachers College, knew that yet another lesson lay within the idea of the art in the everyday, namely "Art as experience." Dewey said, "The work of art has a unique quality,… that of clarifying and concentrating meaning contained in scattered and wakened ways in the material of other experiences."(27) Sometime during his tenure at the neighborhood center Lawrence began making pictures inside cardboard shipping cartons. Lawrence did not keep the boxes, but he has described them. They were, as he said, "places where I had lived." He did not conceive of them as replicas–like ships in a bottle. Rather, they were arrangements. He said that he filled the boxes as one would design for the stage, though, in his words, "I didn't know about the theatre at the time." The idea of people on a platform posing or performing like players would be carried over to such paintings as Lawrence's migrants and builders themes. Lawrence has confirmed that he did indeed discover an analogue to painting while working within the preset geometry of the boxes. "They were just like any two-dimensional painting–only they were three-dimensional," he said.(28) The spaces of both, as they framed space, encapsulated Lawrence's growing awareness of "the world conceived and grasped as picture."(29) This awareness would compel him to make art, and eventually to call himself an artist. When he was seventeen Lawrence quit Commerce High School, thus ending his mother's hopes for his securing his future as a postman. As he said, "I knew what I wanted to paint and I found that both my school work and painting were suffering and I had to give up one or the other so I left school."(30) Lawrence may have struck out on his own, but he also kept Alston as a guide. His formal schooling ended in 1934, just when Alston left the 135th Street library and started a new workshop funded by the WPA at 306 West 141st Street.(31) Lawrence has always been clear about the importance of the 306 workshop. "It was responsible for those who may not have developed professionally as others to receive the experience of those who were professional, you see."(32) Alston was not only the sole black artist with a master's degree in New York City, he was also the first salaried WPA art workshop director in Harlem.(33) Among Alston's first decisions was to hire Henry Bannarn, a personable artist with great technical virtuosity. Alston intended to handle the drawing and painting classes while Bannarn concentrated on the teaching of sculpture, but team teaching was more the rule.(34) Alston's workshop offered a new model of the artist's studio. It was not an isolated bohemian garret but rather a guildlike workshop for masters and a gathering place for their protégés–a bottega in the truest sense. Since the late 1920s the College Art Association had advocated the bottega as a place where the artist focused on teaching and useful production very similar to Lawrence's later description of 306.35 "You were able to ask questions of people who had more experience than yourself about technical things in painting."(36) If the WPA workshop was, in Lawrence's words, "my education,"(37) what did he learn in the bottega at 306? At 306 the exchanges involved more than just technical information because here the teacher was not only a skilled craftsman but a well-read, active voice in the community. At 306 art was not a solitary ritual; it both was conducted in the world and brought the world inside the artist. Lawrence's earliest accounts confirm this: "During my apprentice days (about seven years) I wasn't grounded so much in the technical side of painting as I was in the philosophy and subject I was attempting to approach. As a professional artist this philosophy has always taken precedence over technique."(38) This definition of the artist would send him out of the studio and back to the 125th Street library or to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art to find out more about who he was. The struggle for self-portrayal by the African American community–indeed the desire to be born anew in the eyes of the world and to contribute powerfully to what it meant to be American–set the tone and direction of the Harlem workshops. Intimations of this Holy Grail colored Alston's repeated requests for federal funds as well as his search for jobs and recognition for his students. This particular mix of racial pride and modern outlook would be reiterated by the artists and writers who came and went from 306. Among them were Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Aaron Douglas, and particularly Bannarn. Looking back, Lawrence saw his goals shaped by the sequence of his workshop activities. As he said, "My first ambition was to design masks. Then I wanted to do stage sets, and I did build a few.… Then I wanted to do murals."(39) The execution of the mural at Harlem Hospital became the culminating event of the 306 workshop. Alston's mural, Magic and Medicine (fig. 24), connected images of tribal Africa, the point of origin for the great diaspora to the New World, with the faces and experiences of Harlem. According to Alston's mentor, the philosopher Alain Locke, Africa was the essential symbol of invention and strength for the New Negro in a modern culture unfettered by the academic tradition of the High Renaissance. This lesson would have been underscored by Lawrence's trips downtown to see West African sculpture in the exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art.(40) Too young to join the some twenty-five young artists (including his future wife, Gwendolyn Knight) working with Alston (artists had to be twenty-one to work on WPA projects), Lawrence nevertheless witnessed Alston's struggle to paint the images of the New Negro as he wanted.(41) Alston said, "You see the faces of those Negroes in the sketch for the mural, he pointed to a fourteen foot white wall, [they] are angular, different from the conventional concept of beauty. But when you paint Negroes who look like Greek gods you're just faking."(42) For Lawrence the message was clear: To be an artist you must paint your race. But how? Right from the start, the sensuous, musical appeal of Lawrence's tempera colors brought attention to Harlem subjects hitherto reserved for realist painters and poets as well as documentary writers and photographers. Lawrence's earliest surviving paintings take as their subjects rooms, facades, pedestrians, sidewalks, streets, and storefronts. The fast-drying, opaque poster paints on brown paper plied the faces of crowds and buildings with the immediacy of caricature. Lawrence's observations exposed hard truths and comic irony in The Eviction (fig. 25), The Party (fig. 26), and Street Scene–Restaurant (see p. 231, fig. 98). In this regard Lawrence's subjects shared much with the blunt humanism of the poet Claude McKay. McKay was able to see and speak artistic truth in a way that the symbolism of the New Negro in Alston's Harlem Hospital murals did not. In Home to Harlem (1928) McKay's empirically detailed accounts had neither ignored nor apologized for the restricted and impoverished aspects of the African American working-class life. Like McKay, Lawrence balanced a certain playfulness of form with a heightened social conscience.(43) The action of angles within the picture plane, known to him from his earliest lessons, together with the flow of colors brushed over the carefully drawn shapes, conveyed immutable laws of ornament, of repetition, symmetry, and alternation. Here the language of pattern aspires to become as natural as speech, as rhythmic as poetry. Above all Lawrence prized this fluency.(44) As he said, "I want the idea to strike right away."(45) Unlike his teachers–Alston and Bannarn, whom he called "college people"(46)–Lawrence adopted no named style, saw no need for oils, but continued with the simplest means of the children's workshops. He made this restriction the basis of his expression. Lawrence later explained, "Limiting yourself to these colors [available in poster paints] gives an experience you wouldn't get otherwise."(47) Lawrence's choice did not have its roots in what Dewey called a "discontent with existing technique,"(48) which led some artists to try to find meaning in new techniques. Lawrence, like most artists of conscience working during the depression, believed such experiments were for high modernists working in isolation.(49) Instead, Lawrence's passion to identify with his audience dictated his choices. "My work almost grew out of the way an unsophisticated person would work in a flat kind of pattern, color, but not academically. And they did encourage this." Who encouraged this thinking of medium and method in terms of education and class? Lawrence has said, "I think it was a period of this kind of encouragement in art–the country was very social minded–and I think the big influences were in art, the Mexican painters."(50) The activities of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco in New York in the 1930s indeed resonated in depression-era Harlem. Lawrence recalled, "I wanted to do murals. It was about this time I learned about Orozco and began to take note of outside well-known artists. He was the first."(51) Prior to doing the Harlem Hospital murals, Alston had watched Rivera paint his mural at Rockefeller Center and had talked to him in French because Rivera knew little English.(52) No longer a cubist, Rivera had much to tell of his conversion to social realism–he even published an account of it. As a muralist he now highlighted objective reality. He immersed himself in the struggles of the working class as one preparing to voice a formerly suppressed idiom or dialect. Yet in concentrating on subject matter Rivera had not forgotten ultramodern technical means. He maintained that he was merely adapting his tools, his plastic form, his medium, even the method of his organization to a more accessible epic format. Dressed in coveralls, Rivera proudly spoke of his productivity. "It was first necessary for me to work night and day in order to arrive at a point where I could honestly call myself a workman.… I find my only justification in painting. Probably that is why I have been able to paint buoyantly, without fatigue, fifty easel pictures, any number of drawings, a quantity of water colors and 150 mural paintings in fresco."(53) This refrain would echo as Alston exhorted the Harlem Art Guild, "In the long run we will not be judged by emergencies but by achievements and these only. Production is very important."(54) Rivera would have classified Lawrence a "workman." Until he was twenty-one, that is, until he was old enough for a paid position on the easel project of the WPA, Lawrence worked for a printer, delivered newspapers, and did construction labor for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to help support his family. Drawings depicting the CCC barracks such as Chow (fig. 27), Infirmary (fig. 28), and Sore Back (fig. 29) attest to the fact that, as he has said, "I was always thinking about art."(55) Like Ben Shahn's series of paintings based on the 1916 trial of the murder of the labor leader Tom Mooney, which was deemed praiseworthy by Rivera, Lawrence's CCC drawings aspire to constitute "a complete portrait of the social environment" in which the artist developed.(56) Lawrence ultimately became a tireless and assiduous researcher. He used his scholarship to the American Artists School in 1937, and beyond that for the next three years, until 1941, his Harmon Foundation and Rosenwald grants, to read voraciously at the Schomberg Library. Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence recalled, "No one worked harder than Jake."(57) Moreover, he was productive. Between 1937 and 1941 Lawrence created more than 170 paintings in series depicting nearly two hundred years of history–or rather history as biography of the black race in America–The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Life of Harriet Tubman, The Life of Frederick Douglass, and The Life of John Brown, as well as the collective biography entitled The Migration of the Negro. An equally ambitious and inventive creative process matched the breathtaking scope of such narratives. To complete each cycle Lawrence made a system of painting as one would plan a city or build a skyscraper. As Orozco had said, "If new races have appeared upon the lands of the New World, such races have the unavoidable duty to produce a new Art in a new spiritual and physical medium. Any other road is plain cowardice.… The architecture of Manhattan is the first step. Painting and sculpture must certainly follow."(58) In creating his earliest cycles, Lawrence first wrote captions and completed sketches (sometimes as many as ten to twenty) for each scene. Lawrence's first question, in fact, when he met Orozco making a mural in New York in 1940 was, "Where's your sketch, where's your detail?" Orozco told Lawrence that he did not need one.(59) By 1941 Lawrence would eliminate the separate step of sketching on paper by drawing directly on his same-sized gessoed panels of hardboard. He created rhythms of horizontal and vertical panels as he laid out the narrative sequence. As Rivera said, "The subject is to the painter what the rails are to a locomotive."(60) Set down like a track on his studio floor, the thirty to sixty panels of a given cycle could be seen together and, most important, painted all at once. Lawrence painted color by color, building up pattern and, in so doing, buttressing dark to light. His choice of colors–black and burnt umber moving to cadmium orange and yellow–achieves an overall decorative unity and consistency in The Migration of the Negro series, for example. Conceived as image and word, the poetry of Lawrence's cycles emerges from the repetition of certain shapes. The enlarged single spike or nail, the links of chains, of lattice, the hand and hammer serve as refrains in the lives, the decisions, the struggle of African Americans in the face of injustice (see The Life of Harriet Tubman, No. 9 [fig. 30], The Migration of the Negro, No. 4 [fig. 31]). At this juncture Claude McKay again entered into Lawrence's education. In the early 1940s Lawrence and McKay lived in the same loft building on 125th Street. As Lawrence recalled, "He would wander into my studio, and I'd go to his place and talk. He was a very tough fellow, and very critical of our whole social environment, critical of whites, critical of blacks."(61) An immigrant from Jamaica to New York in 1912, McKay knew something about crossing boundaries. Sustained by an American literary tradition of dissent and social criticism, McKay became both a contributor and the only African American editor of the Liberator during the 1910s and 1920s. Langston Hughes recalled that back then McKay "wore a red shirt and mingled with the white radicals and writers of the town–a thing that shocked both Negroes and whites who were not used to seeing a big black boy breaking away from the color line."(62) In the summer of 1941, soon after Lawrence completed The Migration of the Negro series, McKay inscribed a copy of his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), for Lawrence: "a peerless delineator of the Harlem scenes and types." In 1946 Lawrence finally named his method and discovered a place on the modern "family tree," when Josef Albers invited him to teach, first as a counselor and later a full instructor, at Black Mountain College (fig. 32). "When I teach," Lawrence said, "I am definitely a descendant of the Bauhaus." Albers's desire to exhibit and study Lawrence's work at Black Mountain was matched by Lawrence's desire to observe him. "I noticed that each day he would sit in a different spot and observe a different painting." What did Albers show Lawrence? Most vivid in Lawrence's recollections is Albers's demonstration with a coat hanger to show the effect of line in space. Lawrence also saw "the magic working in the picture plane" when Albers simply changed one shape or altered just one color or revised the edge in a given composition.(63) Lawrence's perceptions–his wonder at Albers's performance of the picture plane was akin to his childhood wonder at trompe-l'oeil paintings at the Metropolitan(64)–inevitably led him to further investigation. Five years later, Lawrence performed his own demonstration. Two opposing performers, two weeping clowns from Vaudeville (fig. 33), face each other on the stage of the Apollo amid a dazzling array of color. The vibrations set in motion by the crisscross of legs, the dense pattern-against-pattern, the checkered overlap of circles and squares are interrupted by a single gesture. This large hand spreading wide alters the pattern of expectation and thereby captures the eye and affects the illusion. Its pantomime asks, "Can you follow?" While watching Albers watch his paintings Lawrence came to recognize and analyze his own love of architectonic structure and economy of color. As with most artists whom he admired, Lawrence found more to like than technique. Here also was "a commitment to life."(65) In the bustling voices of students around tables working with their chosen craft at Black Mountain College Lawrence may have also recognized and identified the means and merits of his earliest instruction, such as Alston's opening exercises of dividing lines according to Dow.(66) Albers's discussion of the economy of color ("Why use five colors when you can use three?"(67)) shared a mission with Utopia Children's House. Both Alston and Albers shared similar convictions about whom and how to teach. Both believed in art for everyone. Both offered a set of visual principles–an emphasis on arrangement, not representation; perception, not description–that broadened the definition of art. In demanding an art of everyday life, both used art as a tool for social reform. We would do well to remember and value, as Lawrence certainly did, the early formats and media that he carried with him into adulthood. Lawrence's early résumé reveals his participation in what were then the new initiatives in art education–what James Porter hailed in 1939 as "a movement" in which "learning opportunities in the craft arts and the higher skills have increased more than fifty percent during the past twelve years."(68) These were well-orchestrated programs operating apart from the traditional atelier, including those run by Columbia University Teachers College graduates James Wells and Charles Alston. They suggest a different, more democratic audience for art. Their settings link child art to practices of modernism. In accordance with Dow's Composition and Dewey's philosophy, Alston's lessons of design–the rules of field and frame–empowered student decisions and thereby attached value to invention. Not surprisingly, in the fall of 1940 the Columbia University School of Architecture, Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture would want to hail the young Lawrence with an exhibition.(69) Lawrence's remarkable solutions to problems in materials and structure provided him the means by which to buttress the two great currents of the epic and the abstract that converged in his mature style. It was Lawrence's confidence in this invention that uniquely equipped him–unlike his professionally trained peers–for a dialogue with Orozco and Albers in the modern arena. "I have an assuredness of myself," he has said.(70) This, perhaps, is the greatest gift of education. |