Visions of a People in Motion

Jacob Lawrence painted “The Migration of the Negro,” 60 small pictures in tempera on hardboard panels, at 33 West 125th Street in Harlem in 1941. Lawrence was 24. "With its visual tact and deep emotion, it was instantly recognized as a tour de force, a new American epic," says Holland Cotter. "It made his career."

"During the World War there was a great migration North by Southern Negroes." (1940-41)

The series is about the shift of African-American populations from a poor and repressive rural South to a prosperous but unwelcoming urban North between the two world wars. Lawrence’s family participated in that shift. For him it was lived history, an organic phenomenon, and he conceived his depiction of it that way. But two concurrent exhibitions — one at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the other at Triple Candie, a nonprofit space in Harlem — suggest that his concept has not come down to us intact.

"Another great ravager of the crops was the boil weevil." (1940-41)

Lawrence painted the 60 pictures not one at a time but production-line style, working on them all simultaneously. In a given studio session he would apply a single color to several paintings in progress. In the next session he would apply another color in the same way. Chromatic recurrence was one way he bound the series together.

The use of repeated motifs was another. Linear uprights — bare trees, prison bars, raised arms, flames — alternate with the flat planes of open skies or high walls to create a rhythm of escapes and enclosures punctuated by exclamations. Figures, often in silhouette, move, then wait, then move again. Descriptive captions under each image enhance a sense of unity. The series begins with these words: "During the World War there was a great migration North by Southern Negroes." It ends, "And the migrants kept coming."

"In many places, because of the war, food had doubled in price." (1940-41)

"For Lawrence the series was a single work, and he wanted it exhibited as such. But from the start his wishes were ignored more often than not. In 1942 the Museum of Modern Art bought half the series: all the even-numbered pictures. The Phillips Gallery in Washington bought the others. Lawrence hoped that both institutions would cooperate in showing the two parts together, which they have. But an integrated work had been irrevocably broken, and the breaking continues."

"Another great ravager of the crops was the boil weevil." (1940-41)

"But the show at the Whitney Museum represents a mere fragment of the Phillips Collection’s larger fragment. The overarching drama of the series, the cumulative product of Lawrence’s thought-through formal calculation and narrative subtlety, is, if not lost, much diminished. And such editing has spurred a second exhibition, 'Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of 'The Migration of the Negro' by Jacob Lawrence,' at Triple Candie."

"They arrived in Pittsburgh, one of the great industrial centers of the North, in large numbers." (1940-41)

"One of the virtues of the piece is that its parts are strong enough to stand on their own. From the opening patchwork image of crowds in a Southern railroad station pushing their way through gates marked 'Chicago,' 'New York' and 'St. Louis'; to one of Northern tenement buildings turned into modernist geometric abstractions; to a third image of the same buildings being bombed — the explosions shoot up like bloodied shaving brushes — during an incident of racial violence."

Copies of the series at Triple Candie.

"There are two good reasons to visit the Triple Candie show: It presents the complete 'Migration of the Negro' series, or a version of it; and it shows it in the Harlem neighborhood where Lawrence created it, a neighborhood that became predominantly African-American as a direct result of that migration. I was just as moved to see the series in reproduction there as I was to see it complete in its original form at the Whitney six years ago, if for different reasons."

"What's more real, after all, art or the feeling of it? History or the telling of it? Medium or message? We know the conventional market wisdom. It's important to have the alternative."

Jacob Lawrence painted “The Migration of the Negro,” 60 small pictures in tempera on hardboard panels, in what seems like a flash. The series was completed in 1941, after about a year of work in a cold-water studio at 33 West 125th Street in Harlem. Lawrence was 24. With its visual tact and deep emotion, it was instantly recognized as a tour de force, a new American epic. It made his career.

The series is about the shift of African-American populations from a poor and repressive rural South to a prosperous but unwelcoming urban North between the two world wars. Lawrence’s family participated in that shift. For him it was lived history, an organic phenomenon, and he conceived his depiction of it that way. But two concurrent exhibitions — one at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the other at Triple Candie, a nonprofit space in Harlem — suggest that his concept has not come down to us intact.

Lawrence painted the 60 pictures not one at a time but production-line style, working on them all simultaneously. In a given studio session he would apply a single color to several paintings in progress. In the next session he would apply another color in the same way. Chromatic recurrence was one way he bound the series together.

The use of repeated motifs was another. Linear uprights — bare trees, prison bars, raised arms, flames — alternate with the flat planes of open skies or high walls to create a rhythm of escapes and enclosures punctuated by exclamations. Figures, often in silhouette, move, then wait, then move again. Descriptive captions under each image enhance a sense of unity. The series begins with these words: “During the World War there was a great migration North by Southern Negroes.” It ends, “And the migrants kept coming.”

For Lawrence the series was a single work, and he wanted it exhibited as such. But from the start his wishes were ignored more often than not. In 1941 Fortune magazine introduced the work to the American public in a specially designed portfolio, but printed only 26 of the paintings. A year later the Museum of Modern Art bought half the series: all the even-numbered pictures. The Phillips Gallery in Washington bought the others.

Lawrence hoped that both institutions would cooperate in showing the two parts together, which they have. But an integrated work had been irrevocably broken, and the breaking continues.

This winter a show of 17 paintings called “Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Migration Series’: Selections From the Phillips Collection” was to have appeared at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a few blocks from where the work was painted. But at the last minute plans changed. Humidity levels at the museum were judged too high for the health of Lawrence’s water-based tempera. So the Whitney Museum, which had included the complete series in a Lawrence retrospective in 2001, picked up the show.

It looks fine there. One of the virtues of the piece is that its parts are strong enough to stand on their own. They do so here: from the opening patchwork image of crowds in a Southern railroad station pushing their way through gates marked “Chicago,” “New York” and “St. Louis”; to one of Northern tenement buildings turned into modernist geometric abstractions; to a third image of the same buildings being bombed — the explosions shoot up like bloodied shaving brushes — during an incident of racial violence.

But the show represents a mere fragment of the Phillips Collection’s larger fragment. The overarching drama of the series, the cumulative product of Lawrence’s thought-through formal calculation and narrative subtlety, is, if not lost, much diminished. And such editing has spurred a second exhibition, “Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of ‘The Migration of the Negro’ by Jacob Lawrence,” at Triple Candie.

Triple Candie is one of few nonprofit spaces in the city, or at least in Manhattan, to offer a serious alternative to the market-addled art mainstream. It has done so in a series of exhibitions that have had, by traditional standards, no art at all, and that might even be considered a threat to the very idea of art as the market defines it.

A few years ago the gallery mounted career retrospectives of the artists David Hammons and Cady Noland. The first show consisted entirely of photocopies of photographs of Mr. Hammons’s work, the second of gallery-made approximations of Ms. Noland’s sculptures. Last year there was a survey of a fictional artist, Lester Hayes, with all the work cooked up (and later destroyed) by Triple Candie’s directors, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett.

Mr. Nesbett is also the founder and director of the Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project and worked closely with Lawrence before his death in 2000. So he brings a measure of authority to a show that claims to follow Lawrence’s wish to have the “Migration” series displayed as a single integral piece.

Whether he would have approved of the way his wishes have been realized here is another question, and probably unanswerable. The entire series is in the gallery but in the form of photographic prints, hung sequentially on a kind of square, free-standing fence enclosing a funky evocation of a sharecropper’s shack.

Lawrence was not averse to substituting prints for paintings. When the Detroit Institute of Arts found it could not, for conservation reasons, regularly lend out his “John Brown” paintings, he made silk-screen print versions for exhibition. Of course signed prints and photographic reproductions carry very different market values. But, the show suggests, when it comes to fully understanding an artist’s work they may have the same use.

The proof is in the looking. It is evident from this display of photo reproductions that “The Migration of the Negro” — Lawrence’s full original title — is most effective when seen complete. Only then do you get a sense of its wedding of intimacy and grandeur, and of its graphic virtuosity, played out in changes of perspective and interaction of symbolic forms.

An aerial view of the aisle of the northward-bound train early in the series becomes a low-angle view of the tunnel-like staircase of a labor camp later. Close-up images of cotton plants and bomb blasts function like syllabic stresses in poetry, controlling momentum and building tension.

And only in the complete series can we fully grasp the sinewy moral texture of art that is in the business of neither easy uplift nor single-minded protest. Among other things, Lawrence is careful to indicate that one of the many subtle forms of bigotry encountered by Southern migrants to the North was class-based black-on-black racism.

There is, however, at least one outstanding reason to visit the “Migration” show at the Whitney, and that is to see it in the context of another of the museum’s current exhibitions: the Kara Walker retrospective. If you want an immediate sense of Lawrence’s far-reaching influence, here it is, in the work of a brilliant younger artist who has taken his narrative impulse, in all its dynamic complexity, in innovative directions.

And there are two good reasons to visit the Triple Candie show: It presents the complete “Migration of the Negro” series, or a version of it; and it shows it in the Harlem neighborhood where Lawrence created it, a neighborhood that became predominantly African-American as a direct result of that migration. I was just as moved to see the series in reproduction there as I was to see it complete in its original form at the Whitney six years ago, if for different reasons.

What’s more real, after all, art or the feeling of it? History or the telling of it? Medium or message? We know the conventional market wisdom. It’s important to have the alternative.

December 28, 2007