Slaves' pasts inspire paintings

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — As a young painter influenced by the Harlem cultural Renaissance and its expressions of freedom, Jacob Lawrence blended art and storytelling to portray two black icons' triumph over oppression.

Painting by Jacob Lawrence Associated Press

Inspired partly by his own family's slave past, Lawrence chose Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman as heroes for a series of paintings tracing the abolitionists' lives from bondage to champions of freedom.

Lawrence's tribute to their unconquerable spirit is a 63-piece exhibition on display at the Speed Art Museum, a short distance from the Ohio River that once represented a springboard to freedom for runaway slaves. Museum officials expect at least 40,000 people to see the show, which opened in early February and continues through April 22.

Lawrence's classic in narrative art, painted in casein tempera on hardboard panels, took three years to research and paint, from 1938 to 1940. He wrote the captions to accompany each painting. The series helped catapult the artist to a lofty place among 20th-century American painters. Lawrence died last June at 82.

"He had an intuitive sense of how to tell a story visually, even at a very, very young age,'' says Lou Stovall, a Washington, D.C., artist and silkscreen printer who was a friend and associate of Lawrence.

Stovall, who printed many of Lawrence's works, says Lawrence excelled at tapping historical subjects to mix social lessons into his art.

"Jacob used history to try to teach some sense of tolerance and racial equity at the same time as making his art,'' Stovall says.

Lawrence's mixing of art and history produced other acclaimed series featuring Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian slave who led his country to freedom from French rule, the white abolitionist John Brown and the great migrations of blacks from the South to the North and West. Fifteen screen prints from the L'Ouverture series are also on display as part of the Speed exhibit.

Artist Sam Gilliam recalls watching four white women weep as they toured Lawrence's migration series at a gallery in Washington, D.C. It showed the appeal of Lawrence's art across ethnic lines, he says.

"I don't like black art being just for black people, particularly when we are against a high wall and outnumbered,'' says Gilliam, who had a long friendship with Lawrence. "Art that is open and shows the next step is very powerful, and that is what I like about the Lawrence series.''

Lawrence's own surroundings — growing up during the Depression, when culture thrived in Harlem — nurtured him as an artist and inspired him to portray Douglass and Tubman.

Trained at the Harlem Art Workshops, he wasn't yet 20 when he started working in the studio of painter Charles Alston. It was there that Lawrence met and learned from such intellectuals as philosopher Alain Locke, writers Langston Hughes and Claude McKay and painter Aaron Douglas.

Douglass and Tubman remained inspiring figures in Harlem, their names invoked by street orators as the spirit of black consciousness bloomed during the era. The horrors of slavery were also personal for Lawrence, whose grandparents and great-grandparents had been enslaved.

His Douglass-Tubman series conjures powerful images of suffering, social turmoil and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit over evil.

The Speed's exhibit hall is filled with contemporary recordings of spirituals that had been popular among slaves. Some of the songs offered more than comfort, revealing clues that were passed among slaves about safe routes north if they should escape.

The series takes a sequential glimpse into the abolitionists' lives.

One painting shows a young Douglass standing with two other children watching the flogging of a slave named Millie. She clutches a tree whose branches reach out, ominously, toward the black children and Millie.

"You feel the tension of the figure of Millie as she is grabbing onto the tree, trying to maintain some sense of control and fighting the overseer,'' says Kim Spence, the Speed Museum's associate curator.

As a young man, Douglass is seen in another painting overpowering a man known as a "slave breaker,'' who is attempting to beat him into submission.

Tubman felt the wrath of an angry overseer in her own youth. A painting shows Tubman stretched on the ground after being struck on the head with an iron bar. A snake slithers nearby, a reference to evil that appears in many of the Tubman pictures as a denunciation of slavery.

The next painting depicts another traumatic moment from Tubman's childhood. She watches as shadowy figures of women slaves beg for mercy while being flogged by an overseer, whip in hand, who stands over them.

"His profile becomes very wolf-like and very ominous,'' Spence says. "It is an incredibly moving image because he uses silhouette and form to tell such a story.''

Another haunting painting shows Tubman's perspective from the auction block, with subtle hints of the hardships awaiting her as prospective buyers size her up with sinister, gray eyes. One man holds a whip, another has a holstered pistol. Barren trees highlight the landscape.

The series shows the escape of Douglass and Tubman from slavery and gradual rise to the forefront of the abolitionist movement. One picture is taken from Douglass' perspective, listening to an anti-slavery speech. All eyes are fixed on Douglass in a later painting as he speaks out against slavery.

The series takes Douglass and Tubman through the Civil War and ends with uplifting messages of hope — an American flag and yellow tulip in the Douglass series and a bright, starry night in the Tubman series.

"He allows art to give hope,'' Gilliam says. "So he's not just the artist who portrays the event, he also puts his own thinking there.''

The exhibit, the first for Lawrence's works since his death, was organized by the Hampton University Art Museum, which owns the works. Spence says the paintings should appeal to everyone, no matter their race.

"While it is about African-American historical subjects, it really gets down to humanity,'' Spence says. "These are issues that concern all of humanity. So whether you are black or white, these are works that you can really respond to and be touched by.''

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