BRIGHT SORROW

FOR nearly two decades, critics have called Jacob Lawrence, 43, "the top U.S. Negro painter"--a race-conscious title that tends to blur his individual style. While the dominant school of abstract art has steadily fled the image, Lawrence goes right on telling simple, straightforward stories. If any artist or style ever influenced him, he cannot quite pin down who or what or when. He has always been his own man, and his very lack of complexity makes him something of a puzzle. "Painting is like handwriting," he says. "Every person has his own style, and my style is just something I do."

This week a retrospective of 58 Lawrence paintings opens at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa.--the third stop in a long, nationwide tour organized by the American Federation of Arts. From the earliest through the latest works, there have been a growing maturity and an increasing sureness of brush, but at heart Lawrence's paintings remain the same. He deals with people who have made history and those who simply endure it -- human tales that are almost always a trifle sad and yet still glow with the wonder of fresh discovery (see color).

Lawrence's father, a railroad cook, suddenly disappeared one day when his son was only seven, but his mother was able both to support the boy and let him develop his budding talent. "Most kids,'' says Lawrence of his boyhood, "draw and paint and write poetry -- I simply never stopped." In Harlem he spent hours making actors' masks and tiny stage sets, and he began working with the Negro artist Charles Alston. Like many of his generation, he was able to stick to his painting by getting on the Federal Art Project during the Depression. He chose to work not in oil but in gouache, later switched to egg tempera, "a brisk medium that cannot be manipulated like oil. You have to get it all right down; you cannot linger over it." Every so often, Lawrence becomes intrigued with some major chapter out of history -- scenes from World War II, in which he served in the Coast Guard, the struggles of the American Revolutionists, the life of John Brown, the plight of migrant workers. When the idea is too broad for a single painting, Lawrence turns out a series. Otherwise he sticks to the things he sees around him -- lovers on a couch before a blaring phonograph, a bone-weary prompter in a cheap vaudeville theater, the teeming streets of Harlem on a steaming summer night.

Few painters use so bright a palette or so bold a brush and still achieve so sorrowful a mood. Purplish blues lie alongside acid greens; reds and yellows vie for attention yet do not seem to clash. Nor do the ragged rhythms of the paintings ever get out of control. Tension mounts in Jacob Lawrence's paintings, but the threatened disorder never takes place.

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