Monday, Dec. 22, 1947
Strike Fast
In the back of the room sat a quiet young Negro, listening while the others talked. It was during the depression, and almost every day Harlem's WPA Art Center was crammed with artists and writers. "It was my education," says Jacob Lawrence. "I met people like Saroyan before he got famous. They all used to talk about what was going on in the world. Not only about art, but everything."
Young Jacob Lawrence was shy, but he felt at home; he had long ago decided to become a painter. His mother had encouraged him when he was still a kid: "It kept me off the streets." Within a few years, his flaming, semi-abstract pictures of Negro life hung in half a dozen top U.S. museums, and won him three Rosenwald fellowships. Only 30 now, Jacob Lawrence is the nation's No. 1 Negro artist.
Last week, Manhattan gallerygoers saw a series of 14 war paintings by Lawrence which were by far his best work yet. During the war he had been a petty officer in the Coast Guard aboard a troop transport, had used anything and everything he had seen as his subject: departure, return, alerts, men in bunks, cooks cooking ("The cooks might not like my paintings, but they appreciated that I was painting a cook"). The pictures he exhibited last week were patterned with the crude simplicity of a poster; his people angular, always distorted; his colors somber, often murky. But the moods he created were sure: the loneliness of a woman reading a letter from overseas, the tortured plunge into battle, the exhausted letdown of victory. It took him just under a year to do the series, working regularly ("good painters are never flighty") and quickly, but only after long mulling. "I work long on the idea for a painting," says he. "I want the idea to strike right away."
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.