Jacob Lawrence painted The Wall in late 1941, while living in New Orleans. Although Lawrence was a New York-based artist, whose early work had included street scenes and images of daily Black life in Harlem, the scope of his artistic interest—and renown—had recently begun to expand. In the late 1930s, he had completed three ambitious historical series, on the lives of important Black figures like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Harriet Tubman. Just the year before, he had won a prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, which allowed him to complete The Migration Series (1941; The Phillips Collection and The Museum of Modern Art), a series of sixty paintings on the Great Migration of southern African Americans to the United States North. Lawrence was in New Orleans, in fact, on a second Rosenwald Fellowship, which he had won with a proposal to create a series of paintings on the life of radical abolitionist John Brown, not unlike his earlier biographical series. With this plan and the Fellowship’s funding in hand, in July of 1941, Lawrence set out for New Orleans—accompanied by his new wife, fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, who he had married earlier the same month.

Although Lawrence’s parents were from different parts of the South, and he had studied the region extensively for The Migration Series, the trip to New Orleans was to be the first time he had visited the region himself. The experience was, for Lawrence, a kind of shock; although the artist had read about, and even painted, the effects of southern racism and legally-sanctioned segregation, in New Orleans, “for the first time [he] really felt it,” as he later described. [1] The rooms on Bienville Avenue that the Lawrences rented from a Black New Orleanian became a refuge for the couple—and it was there that Lawrence, true to his plan, went on to paint the twenty-two panels that would become The Legend of John Brown (1941; Detroit Institute of Arts), completing it in the months after they arrived. [2]

The Wall belongs to another set of paintings that Lawrence began in New Orleans—separate from the “official” project of the John Brown series, and with a different orientation. In these works, Lawrence turned outward, attempting to come to grips with New Orleans, its urban space, people, and culture—channeling the sharp powers of observation he had honed painting Harlem street scenes in the 1930s. In works like Rampart Street (1941; Portland Art Museum), Catholic New Orleans (University Art Museum, Berkeley), and Bus (1941; private collection), Lawrence captures different parts of the city’s distinctive architecture and culture—from the elaborate wrought-iron grillwork that adorns many of its buildings, to the blend of religious traditions practiced by its residents, the legacy of the overlapping waves of immigration that shaped the city’s history. The Wall sits neatly within this group of artworks—reflecting the unique presence of levees within New Orleans.

Unlike the panels of The Legend of John Brown, which he crafted as one cohesive series, Lawrence regularly sent his New Orleans paintings to his gallerist in New York, Edith Halpert, who sold them individually from her Downtown Gallery; in the case of The Wall, Lawrence sent the work directly to a collector and supporter, designer Helen Grayson. [3] Due in part to this history of their sale—so different from the panels of The Migration Series, which Lawrence and his representatives endeavored to keep together—the New Orleans works have typically been understood as single, discrete works. There are reasons to consider the New Orleans paintings as a related set of artworks, however—if not one of the artist’s carefully planned narrative “series,” then certainly what he sometimes called a “theme,” a group of works loosely adhered around a common set of interests. [4]

When placed alongside the other New Orleans works, for example, The Wall no longer appears a straightforward reflection on the city’s built environment. Instead, it becomes part of a wider exploration of barriers, partitions, and obstructions, which appear across many of the paintings—the divider in Bar and Grill (1941; Smithsonian American Art Museum), which separates the Black and white sections of a restaurant; the betting-rings of The Green Table (1941; private collection), which hem in the Black gambler in its lower register; or even the kind of negative-barrier, the barrier by absence, implied in the empty windows separating the airy front and crowded rear of the vehicle in Bus. If Lawrence evidences a decided interest in the architecture and urban space of New Orleans, in other words, this interest is in service of a deeper interrogation of the structuring effects of segregation, how it shaped the city’s physical form and the lives of its people—the ways it became so deeply embedded as to become a kind of infrastructure.

With this context, it is easier to appreciate the ways that Lawrence has depicted the levee in The Wall: its foreboding massiveness, for example, which looms over the family who hurries past it. It becomes harder, too, to ignore the painting’s daring, the way it gives over almost the entire composition to the levee’s utter flatness—harnessing the implied infinity of the modernist grid to further the impression of the wall’s dominance, the never-endingness of Jim Crow. This refusal of almost any sense of compositional depth creates a powerful sense of constriction, not unlike the one that had characterized Lawrence’s own experience in New Orleans. Ultimately, though, The Wall clarifies that the stakes of this confinement are broader than any single individual’s experience; in its choice to focus on a young Black family, it raises the question of the multi-generational effects of segregation and discrimination. The painting is blunt on this front; not only is each member of the family burdened with their own load—from the father’s briefcase to the youngest child’s dangling doll—but the direction of their movement,

and their implied futures, is set directly against the levee’s unyielding mass of brick. In The Wall, in other words, we feel the edge of Lawrence’s sharpening social critique, which he would bring to bear on a range of issues in the subsequent decades of his career—as well as his enduring commitment to depicting the human dimension of these issues.

— Claire Ittner

[1] Aline B. Louchheim, “Lawrence: Quiet Spokesman,” ArtNews (October 15, 1944).

[2] Ellen Harkins Wheat, Jacob Lawrence, American Painter (Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with the Seattle Art Museum, 1986), 65; Ellen Sharp, “The Legend of John Brown and the Series by Jacob Lawrence,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 67, no. 4 (1993): 14–35.

[3] Grayson had also written Lawrence a letter of recommendation for his Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940.

[4] See quotations in Wheat, Jacob Lawrence, American Painter, 143; and transcript of interview by Peter Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, June 7, 1999, 1–2, quoted in Sims, “The Structure of Narrative: Form and Content in Jacob Lawrence’s Builders Paintings, 1946–1998,” 215n35.