His earliest
work attracted the attention of the artist Charles Alston and so,
from 1932 to 1939, Lawrence worked with Alston and Henry Bannarn in
their studio they kept together. In 1937, Lawrence joined a Civilian
Conservation Corps work gang and learned how to handle a shovel. Thanks
to a scholarship, he was then able to return to art and the American
Artists School until 1939, when he became one of many artists working
for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration.
Of this Lawrence says: "It was my education. . . .We (artists) would
meet each other and we talked and we talked." The talk was exciting
and generally revolved around the idea of social content in art. Lawrence
had been painting the things he saw around him and unavoidably expressing
his feelings about the life he experienced in Harlem. He became interested
in history, especially African American history, and painted several
series of paintings on such subjects. Finally he won a Rosenwald Fund
Fellowship that permitted him to expand his range of material.
His first one-man show opened on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941;
Lawrence's narrative paintings were an instantaneous success. Two
museums bought them all, and twenty-six were reproduced by "Fortune"
magazine for a special color issue. A tour of duty in the United States
Coast Guard resulted in a series on life in that branch of the service;
a hospital stay led to a series on hospital life. Lawrence is a compassionate
and hopeful human being, and a fascinating storyteller. His style
is expressionistic, with strong compositional movement, dramatic rhythms,
and rich color-stunning in the use of pure scarlet, clear blue, and
subtle whites combined with lively browns and blacks. Although his
work is concerned with African Americans, it is universally appealing
and as such is indicative of the fact that the struggle of one man
becomes part of the struggle of all mankind for freedom and human
dignity.
|
Featured
Paintings
