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Where could Jacob Lawrence go after "The Migration Series"? Lawrence's trailblazing work of sixty paintings, originally called "The Migration of the Negro," pulled together the story of the Great Migration into a visual American epic. Painted all at once, color by color, the episodic panels present the early twentieth-century movement of black Americans from the rural South to the industrial North as a puzzle of dynamic shapes and vibrant hues. Accompanied by Lawrence's tightly researched narrative, which supplies the title for each panel, the distilled forms tie the compositions together while connecting the episodes into a unified and abstracted whole.
Sponsored by the Rosenwald Foundation, the series of 1940-41 launched Lawrence from the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, where he conducted his historical research, to national acclaim. After showing at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery-Lawrence was the first black American to be represented by a New York gallery-the series was acquired in its entirety through a joint institutional purchase. The odd numbered panels went to Washington's Phillips Collection; the evens went to New York's Museum of Modern Art. Lawrence was just twenty-three years old.
The moving power of this dynamic work is revealed every time the series is reunited- most recently in "One-Way Ticket," the exhibition that was on view at moma in 2015. Writing of an earlier reunion, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, Hilton Kramer noted that into each image, executed in tempera, gouache or watercolor, is distilled a dramatic episode or emotion of great simplicity, yet the crowded succession of such images traces a complex course Drawing is reduced to the delineation of flat shapes and easily read gestures. Figures are seen as the sum of their actions, never as individualized personalities. Color is generally somber, yet illuminated by moments of gemlike intensity. There is an extraordinary velocity in this style and an extraordinary empathy. It succeeds in creating a world, and it holds us in its grip.
Lawrence was the product of the same Great Mgration he depicted. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917, at thirteen he continued the family's migration north, moving with his mother and sister to Harlem. A child prodigy, he soon apprenticed with Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, and other...