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Indepth Arts News:
"Jacob Lawrence: The Toussaint L'Ouverture Series"
2000-10-07 until 2000-12-03
Norton Museum of Art
West Palm Beach, FL,
USA
The Norton Museum of Art
opens a new exhibition entitled
Jacob Lawrence: The
Toussaint L'Ouverture Series
on October 7, 2000. This
exhibition features all 41
paintings from the artist's 1937 -
38 pictorial history of the Haitian
Revolution, the only successful
slave rebellion in the history of
the Western Hemisphere. The
Amistad Research Center at
Tulane University, New Orleans
and the Norton Museum of Art
have collaborated on the
organization of this show - which
will only be presented in West
Palm Beach. The Toussaint
L'Ouverture Series is from the
Aaron Douglas Collection at The
Amistad Research Center.
Born in 1917 in Atlantic City,
New Jersey, Jacob Lawrence
was raised in Harlem where he
not only witnessed the poverty
and prejudice that most
African-Americans faced in the
early 20th century, but also the
remarkable cultural, intellectual
and political development
known as the Harlem
Renaissance. Lawrence
reached maturity in the 1930s, at a time when Harlem was among the
world's most dynamic centers of aesthetic and social innovation. As
orators shouted their messages from nearly every street corner in
Harlem, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke were challenging and
redefining the very identity of the African-American people; Langston
Hughes was introducing the black experience to modernist poetry;
Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway retooled jazz and African-American
blues for the big band and the orchestra; and such artists as Aaron
Douglas, Charles Alston, Archibald Motley, Loïs Mailou Jones,
Romare Bearden and William H. Johnson introduced an expressive
force to modern painting few had ever witnessed. It was against the
backdrop of this vibrant milieu that the 20-year-old Jacob Lawrence
made a dramatic debut with his Toussaint L'Ouverture Series.
During Lawrence's childhood,
the story of black America was
all but ignored in the schools,
indeed most people believed
that African-Americans had no
history or at least none that
merited study or perpetuation.
In reaction to this bigotry, the
scholar and bibliophile Arthur A.
Schomburg, over a 30 year
period, assembled a vast
collection of books, manuscripts,
prints, drawings and ephemera,
all in some way describing and
detailing the richness of the
African-American experience.
Schomburg's holdings were
eventually acquired by the New
York Public Library and housed
in the Harlem branch, where
they were repeatedly consulted
during Lawrence's research of
Toussaint L'Ouverture and
throughout the execution of his
1937-38 series devoted to the
Haitian revolutionary.
Lawrence's experience with the
Schomburg collection led the
artist to embrace black history
as a crucial theme in his work.
Not only did the Toussaint
L'Ouverture paintings emerge
from his investigation of the
Schomburg material, but so too
did subsequent series devoted
to Harriet Tubman, Frederick
Douglass, John Brown and the
migration of African-Americans
from the rural south to northern
industrial centers.
Lawrence's
41
paintings trace more than
events from the life of
Toussaint L'Ouverture. The
series is a rich and methodical
historical analysis that
cogently connects European
expansionism, colonialism,
plantation economies, the
slave trade, Enlightenment
philosophy and Napoleon's
emergence in France to the
establishment of a Haitian
Republic. Epic in historical
scope, yet rendered in human
terms (and on a human
scale), Lawrence conceived
the Toussaint L'Ouverture
Series as paintings of
liberation in small increments
on a daily basis. This
fundamental engagement
with the human quality in
man keeps the Toussaint
L'Ouverture Series and all of
Lawrence's work from ever
becoming pedantic, moralizing
or condescending. Bound to
the social climate of his age,
with all its attendant anger
and prejudice, Jacob
Lawrence's uncommon
contribution to the 20th
century was an art that
sought justice without cruelty,
truth without bitterness and
revealed nobility of human
freedom.
IMAGE:
General L'Ouverture collected forces at Marmelade,
and on October 9, 1794, left with 500 men to capture San Miguel.,
1937-1938,
Gouache on paper,
27.9x48.3 cm.,
Aaron Douglas Collection,
The Amistad Research Center,
Tulane University, New Orleans
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