Stanzas From a Black Epic

By ROBERT HUGHES

The show of all 60 paintings of Jacob Lawrence's Migration series, at the Phillips Collection in Washington, is an event that no one interested in African-American cultural history -- or, in a wider way, the story of American painting as a whole -- could pass up. The works haven't been shown in two decades, but they constitute the first, and arguably still the best, treatment of black-American historical experience by a black artist. (Romare Bearden's collages are slices of life, but they do not form an explicit historical narrative in the way that Lawrence's paintings do.)

Fifty years have passed since Lawrence made these little pictures, on store- bought panels in his Harlem studio; and they are of far greater power than almost all the acreage of WPA murals that preceded them in the 1930s. They were almost immediately bought, half by the Phillips Collection and half by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and were in fact the first paintings by a black artist to enter MOMA's collection. It seemed to both Alfred Barr of MOMA and Duncan Phillips that Lawrence's series represented a unique conjunction of black experience, history painting and a modernist idiom. They were right. From Benjamin West to Robert Rauschenberg, American art is sown with attempts, varying between utter bathos and success, to image forth the American story. And for reasons that are lamentably obvious, practically none of these were created by blacks, until Lawrence appeared.

Younger than the painters and writers who took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the '20s, Lawrence was also at an angle to them: he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks -- the Noble Negroes in Art Deco drag -- that others tended to produce as an antidote to the vile stereotypes with which white popular art had flooded the culture since Reconstruction. Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu -- in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard- trained aesthete who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks that could speak explicitly to the African-American community and still embody the values of modernism. Or, in Locke's words: "There is in truly great art no essential conflict between racial or national traits and universal human values."

If Lawrence's series delivers a rebuke to current fictions of cultural separatism -- "It's a black thing; you wouldn't understand" -- so does its encouragement by New York's liberal white culture; it is worth remembering (and is documented at some length in the Phillips catalog) that the Migration series could not have been done without several grants from the Rosenwald Fund, instigated by Locke, and might never have acquired a public life without the determined backing of the art dealer Edith Halpert.

What are the paintings about? A huge subject, which no artist could touch and only an African-American one could have handled with the depth of feeling it required. The migration of blacks from the rural South to the industrial North, as it unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century, had an epic character: a collective Odyssey to match the Iliad of the Civil War. It was forced by the merciless Southern white reaction that came in the wake of Reconstruction, plunging the black population of the Southern states -- all poor, nearly all rural -- into a purgatory of abrogated rights.

In the South, 1900-25 brought the high tide of Jim Crow laws, of lynchings and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. Unable to vote, powerless to change their political status, Southern blacks voted with their feet, and by the end of the '30s more than a million of them (the exact figures will probably never be known) had flocked to mid-Atlantic, Northeastern and Midwestern cities. They were looking for a better America than the one they had known. Some of them no doubt imagined they were going to a promised land; and in this they were sharply disappointed, especially after 1929, when they arrived in a North economically devastated by the Depression.

But there was no way back. The South was drained of its black proletariat, while the North acquired a new one, out of which grew a radically altered conception of black culture: distinctively urban but still Southern in its origins and collective memory. This was the culture whose synthesis produced the Harlem Renaissance. In it, American blacks reinvented themselves.

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917, Lawrence was schooled in Harlem and grew up among migrants and their children. When, years later, he told an interviewer that "I am the black community," he was neither bragging nor kidding. He trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the public library's 135th Street branch. Indeed the library itself, with its Schomburg Collection, Manhattan's chief archive on African-American life and history, was to shape his series: Lawrence did months of painstaking research there to get the historical background right, even though the final paintings rarely allude to specific events. He took on the task with a youthful earnestness (he was in his early 20s) that remains one of the most touching aspects of the final work and goes far beyond mere self-expressiveness. You sense that something is speaking through Lawrence.

One of the remarkable things about the Migration series is the language it does not use. Lawrence was not a propagandist. He eschewed the caricatural apparatus of Popular Front, Social Realist art, then at its peak in America. Considering the violence and pathos of so much of his subject matter -- prisons, deserted communities, city slums, race riots, labor camps -- his images are restrained, and all the more piercing for their lack of bombast. When he painted a lynching, for instance (No. 15), he left out the dangling body and the jeering crowd: there is only bare earth, a branch, an empty noose and the huddled lump of a grieving woman. He set aside the Mexican-muralist influence that lay so heavily on other artists who thought it was the only way to commemorate the People; he wasn't painting murals, but images closer in size to single pages, no more than 18 in. by 12 in.

Nevertheless, he imagined the paintings as integrally connected -- a single work of art, no less united than a mural is, but portable. Migration has the effect of a visual ballad, with each painting a stanza: taut, compressed, pared down to the barest requirements of narration. No. 10, They Were Very Poor, takes the elements of a Southern sharecropper's life down to the static minimum: a man and a woman staring at empty bowls on a bare brown plane, an empty basket hung on the wall by an enormous nail -- the sort of nail you imagine in a crucifixion. There isn't a trace of the sentimentality that coats Picasso's Blue Period miserablisme.

Lawrence called his style "dynamic Cubism," but although its debt to late Cubism is obvious -- the flat, sharp overlaps of form, legible silhouettes and generally high degree of abstraction in the color -- it isn't notably dynamic; ^ it tends to an Egyptian stillness, friezelike even when you know the subject was in motion, like the crowd surging into the narrow slot between two railroad cars in No. 23, And the Migration Spread.

Mainly (though some panels are weaker than others) the style gives the pictures an infrangible gravity, as in No. 57, The Female Worker Was Also One of the Last Groups to Leave the South, with its single figure of a laundress in a white smock, stirring a vat of fabrics -- blue, black, yellow, pink -- with her pole: a dense and well-locked composition, suggesting the permanence and resistance that form one of the underlying themes of Lawrence's great series.