Jacob Lawrence American, 1917-2000

This work has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition Jacob Lawrence: African American Modernist being organized by Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, The Netherlands, September 2025–January 2026.

In a 1946 essay entitled “My Opinion about Painting,” Jacob Lawrence wrote, “I feel that I am more articulate in painting than in any other form of expression … I paint the things I know about and the things I have experienced. The things I have experienced extend into my national, racial, and class group. So I paint about the American Negro working class.” [1] Lawrence’s statement gets to the essence of his body of work, which spans more than sixty years. Utilizing a reductive modernist style to impart socially conscious themes, Lawrence created art to tell stories of Black history and life based on his own observations and experiences. Growing up in Harlem was fundamental to Lawrence’s worldview, and his earliest paintings, including Christmas, consist of Harlem streets and interiors that focus on work, community and family interactions, entertainments, evictions, and poverty. Through simplified form, Lawrence exhibits his astute awareness and sympathy for his surrounding environment without falling into sentiment or didacticism. As Patterson Sims writes, “From the start Lawrence’s greatest gift has been his ability to take everyday existence and, with a sociologist’s keen observation and a pastor’s compassion, infuse it with universality…It was the primary subject matter of his early work and remains the visible background of all that he has done since.” [2]

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917, Lawrence moved to Harlem as a child in 1930. He studied art as a teenager at Utopia House, a neighborhood program that supported educational needs for children with working mothers, whose art program was run by Charles Alston. Lawrence studied further with Alston from 1932 to 1934 at the Harlem Art Workshop, which was supported by the College Art Association and held classes at the 135th street public library, an epicenter for the study of Black arts, culture, and history. Alston considered Lawrence’s meager upbringing an asset to his art; rather than obsessing over the study of western art and its attendant hierarchies and heroes, Lawrence cultivated a unique style untethered to the rigidities of art school training. Alston allowed Lawrence to develop independently, claiming, “there was always something very simple and direct about his approach.” [3] With the support of Augusta Savage, Lawrence joined the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sponsored workshop created under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. There he joined Alston and sculptor Henry Bannarn at their studio at 306 West 141st Street (called “306”), where he worked until 1940. [4] As Lawrence recalled, “The artists were all working together…We saw each other’s work. We talked about art.” [5] This dynamic artistic community supported and fueled his artistic development. As common to 1930s social realism, many of these artists looked to their immediate environment for inspiration. Alston’s lithograph Harlem Street Scene (c. 1935–43), for example, exhibits the broader interest in the streets of Harlem engaged by Lawrence’s milieu. Like Lawrence, Alston explores the anonymity of the city and its largeness, conveying interactions through gesture, albeit strikingly different from Lawrence in its realist mode and attention to light and shadow.

In 1937, Lawrence received a two-year scholarship to the American Artists School, located at 131 West 14th Street, where he studied with politically engaged artists Harry Gottlieb, Anton Refregier, and Philip Reisman. At this time, Lawrence began painting images of everyday Harlem, developing what would become his signature style of bold, flat planes of color and coarse lines, shallow and inconsistent space, and a play between broad simplifications of form and close attention to details such as pattern and texture. Lawrence painted multiple Harlem scenes at this time, including Christmas (recorded by Lawrence as “Christmas in Harlem” on the painting), which was first exhibited in “Jacob Lawrence and Samuel Wechsler” in 1939 at the American Artists School. Christmas was one of twenty-three works by Lawrence on display in the exhibition. [6]

In her review of the exhibition for ArtNews, Jeannette Lowe writes, “A style which it is easy to call primitive marks his versions of ice peddlers, the subway, the park and restaurants, but closer inspection reveals draughtsmanship too accomplished to be called naïve. The bright colors in flat areas and the literal view of the world turn out to be just his manner of expressing his very sensitive reactions to the kaleidoscopic, animated world, in which his spirit is not to be downed by the oppression and neglect of his own people which he sees on all sides. They have little of the mournfulness of the spirituals. Rather are they testimony of the unquenchable joie de vivre of the Negro, his inestimable gift to repressed, gloomy Nordics.” [7] The writer’s conception that examination of Lawrence’s work reveals sophistication rather than simplicity is one repeated throughout reviews and scholarship of his work. The idea of the Black artist as “primitive,” however, and that Black people collectively offer a sense of joy that is sorely lacking within white society, evidences racial stereotypes typical of the period. Lowe may have been echoing Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which contrasts Black assimilationists to white society with Blacks willing to honor their own (particularly religious) culture, yet Hughes makes a poignant critique of Black cultural denial, rather than simply contrasting Black happiness with white rationality and repression.[8] Further, Lowe’s conception is not persuasive upon close observation of the paintings, most of which convey not joy but rather frustration and fatigue alongside resilience and strength.

Of Lawrence’s early work, Patricia Hills writes, “Through his style and compositional inventiveness, he made the tenements and streets of Harlem modern. Like Hughes in his poetry, Lawrence early on depicted the Harlem of ordinary working-class African Americans in seemingly artless terms: a limited palette of matte tempera color, simple shapes distributed rhythmically across the composition, and a minimum of lines to indicate facial expression and other telling details.” [9] Christmas embodies the rhythm and visual economy that Hills describes. Rather than focusing on light and shading to create depth, Lawrence uses color and scale. Avoiding a focal point, he applies bright hues of reds, yellows, and pinks, alongside darker shades of greens, browns, and black that balance each other while moving the eyes around the composition. Of his reduced palette, Lawrence noted, “Limiting yourself to these colors gives an experience you wouldn’t get otherwise…The idea is, it forces you to work with less, to work with a degree of economy, and out of that you could get a stronger work than you might get otherwise.” [10]

In Christmas, gesturing hands and diagonal forms, particularly of the woman in the immediate foreground and the figure in yellow behind her who ostensibly hails a cab, activate the environment. The foreground woman reaches for shopping bags adorned with a series of stripes and gold handles that differentiate the bags, adding a touch of color to an otherwise dark region of the composition. The rudimentary faces express emotion through downcast eyes, thin lips, and focused expressions. Distanced background figures exhibit no facial features but rather stand as bodies in motion that trudge through the streets with hands in pockets, largely with heads bowed. Lawrence includes blank billboards – which will be filled in later works such as This is Harlem (1943, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution) – in a manner that structures space without overcrowding or distracting with advertising text. While expressions are underemphasized, Lawrence details the woodgrain of the posts on both sides of the street, providing a sense of texture as well as stabilizing forms within a dynamic composition.

Lawrence omits a skyline in this work, crafting an enclosed space that accentuates the architectural structure of Harlem. Simultaneously, the wide street and diminutive background figures provide a sense of expansiveness, particularly in comparison to the central foreground figures. The largely open street, which holds a single car, enables a view of the crowds across the road, providing a visual break from the commotion of moving bodies. This subjective sense of scale recalls Lawrence’s reflection upon moving to New York City: “We came to New York and of course this was a completely new visual experience seeing the big apartments … This was an impact which left its impression.”[11] Many of Lawrence’s scenes of Harlem convey a sense of restriction – as if being engulfed by the city – albeit mixed with a mood of action and excitement.

The lack of a horizon line and extensive use of brick recalls the work of Ben Shahn, a fellow social realist that, like Lawrence, exhibited at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in New York. [12] While Lawrence didn’t recall viewing Shahn’s work until the 1940s, [13] their paintings share conceptual devices. In Shahn’s Vacant Lot (1939, The Wadsworth Atheneum), for example,

Shahn exaggerates a red brick wall to extreme proportions to underscore the loneliness and isolation of a young boy. In referencing the painting, Shahn described “the big red brick wall dwarfing the boy playing all alone" [14] as his method of visual dramatization. Despite this towering space, Shahn conveys a sense of purpose and pleasure. As John Fagg writes, “The painting imagines this boy repeatedly throwing up a stone then swinging his bat, the ritual of coming to the vacant lot to practice, and the compulsion – perfectionism, failure, rejection – that leads him to practice alone.” [15] Lawrence’s walls, in contrast to Shahn’s, appear animated and tamed by the human activity that they frame. Ellen Harkins Wheat notes, “Shahn was trained as a graphic artist and photographer, and his paintings display a luminous, realistic precision for which Lawrence does not strive.” [16] The quavering lines unique to each artist’s work, however, speaks to a shared devotion to understanding and recording the city through painstaking attention to the authority of architectural structures.

Lawrence underscores the geometry and magnitude of the city in multiple paintings. In This is Harlem, for example, Lawrence presents Harlem through an elevated, panoramic view filled with harmonic repetitions of forms and colors. Diminutive figures suggest the expanse of the city street as they wind among tall buildings. Lawrence’s attention to fire escapes in this work functions similarly to the framing components of the bricks in Christmas by creating a repeated pattern that draws the eyes vertically and horizontally. Christmas places the viewer at ground level, however, locating us within rather than above the city.

Lawrence’s visual flourishes in Christmas include the curving lamppost that breaks up the repetition of the bricks, as do the arched trees, their cut trunks suggesting their placement for sale against the backdrop of the city. These trees, alongside winter attire which includes hats, coats, and gloves, stand as the primary references to Christmas. Lawrence pairs the trees for sale with the purchasing of food for a Christmas meal. A figure on the left just leaving the butcher shop, adorned with a single button on her coat and a glimpse of a red skirt beneath, carries a duck with legs protruding from a brown bag, mimicking those on display behind her. Lawrence returns to this theme in The Butcher Shop (1938, private collection), where hanging ducks and slabs of meat occupy the window. In both paintings, the market is tended by a white butcher, perhaps referencing majority white ownership of businesses in Harlem. [17] The Butcher Shop draws attention to this form of commerce, while creating a backdrop for isolated figures waiting out the rain beneath the shelter of the store’s awnings.

Lawrence returned to painting the interiors and streets of Harlem in the fall of 1942, although he would no longer live in Harlem after being drafted into the Coast Guard in 1943. [18] His extensive body of work would include historical scenes of Black heroes and heroines, a hospital series, the tensions and violence of the civil rights movement, and the repeated theme of labor as a physical and intellectual pursuit. Christmas serves as a provocative starting point to what will be a long and prolific career of exploring formal innovations in pursuit of recording Black life, labor, and community.

—Phoebe Wolfskill

[1] Jacob Lawrence, “My Opinion about Painting,” Artist League of America (ALA) News no. 2 (1946): 2.

[2] Patterson Sims, Jacob Lawrence: The Early Decades 1935-1950 (Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, 1992), unpaged.

[3] Kenkeleba Gallery, Charles Alston: Artist and Teacher (New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1990), 21.

[4] Ellen Harkins Wheat, Jacob Lawrence American Painter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 20.

[5] Lawrence quoted in Elizabeth McCausland, “Jacob Lawrence,” Magazine of Art 38 (November 1945): 253.

[6] Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 291, no. 28.

[7] Jeannette Lowe, “The Negro Sympathetically Rendered by Lawrence; Wechsler,” ArtNews 37, no. 21 (February 18, 1939): 15.

[8] Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation 122 (June 23, 1926): 692-694.

[9] Hills, 171.

[10] Lawrence quoted in Wheat, 34.

[11] Oral history interview with Jacob Lawrence by Carroll Greene, 1968 October 26. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[12] Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 11.

[13] Wheat, 42.

[14] Ben Shahn quoted in John D. Morse, ed., Ben Shahn (New York: Praeger, 1972), 61.

[15] John Fagg, “Sport and Spectatorship as Everyday Ritual in Ben Shahn’s Painting and Photography,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 28, nos. 8-9 (2011), 1366.

[16] Wheat, 42.

[17] Stephen Robertson, Shane White, Stephen Garton, “Harlem in Black and White,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 5 (September 2013): 864-880.

[18] Sims, unpaged.