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28 American Art | Fall 2014 Jacob Lawrence, Taboo, 1963. Tempera on Hardboard, 27 3/4 X 31 7/8 In. Philadelphia Museum of Ar

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28 American Art | Fall 2014 Jacob Lawrence, Taboo, 1963. Tempera on Hardboard, 27 3/4 X 31 7/8 In. Philadelphia Museum of Ar Jacob Lawrence, Taboo, 1963. Tempera on hardboard, 27 3/4 x 31 7/8 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Zelda and Josef Jaffe Family © 2014 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 28 American Art | Fall 2014 Confronting Taboo Photography and the Art of Jacob Lawrence Tanya Sheehan Taboo (frontispiece) is one of the many works in tempera that Jacob Lawrence produced during the civil rights movement. The scant writing on the painting notes the vibrant colors and characteristically planar style that the African American modernist used to render his figures. It also reads those figures as two pairs of newlyweds, participating in a double wedding.1 On the left, a man in a black top hat and suit with white gloves and fair facial skin tones stands arm in arm with his bride, a woman with a dark brown face who wears pearls and a white dress, the sharp folds of which cast pink shadows whose color is picked up by her bouquet of flowers. On the right, the bride and groom are arranged and clothed similarly, although there are marked differences in coloration; this man has a dark complexion, while the woman has a much lighter face, and her dress and flowers are predominantly yellow. The work’s title encourages viewers to read the four figures—two “black” and two “white”—as having challenged the taboo against interra- cial marriage. In 1963, when Lawrence painted Taboo, antimiscegenation laws were still in effect in the United States, particularly in the South, which made the act depicted not only a social transgression but also a felony.2 Read in that context, Taboo celebrates the two couples’ courage in the face of adversity and thus serves as one of many meditations on miscegenation in African American art of the period.3 When I first saw Taboo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I was struck by something that seemed at odds with this interpretation, something that reminded me of my research on early American photography. I could not help but associate the painting’s horizontal, rectangular frame and pair of arches with the unique format of photographic stereoviews (fig. 1). These rectangular pieces of cardboard, to which two nearly identical photographs were attached, were intended to be looked at through a binocular instrument known as a stereoscope. Seen through such a device, the images on the card appeared as a single three-dimensional picture, offering up spectacular sights of landscapes and peoples from the United States and around the world. Stereoviews were immensely popular among white middle-class Americans between the 1850s and the 1920s but were falling out of favor as a form of home entertainment during Lawrence’s youth. Could the painter have set the figures in Taboo within a stereoview, I wondered? If so, what would it mean to reinterpret Taboo in photographic terms? To begin, it would suggest that we are not looking at a double wedding at all but instead at a picture of a single couple, duplicated and juxtaposed. The shadow depicted on the left edge of each arch is certainly con- sistent with the repetitions characteristic of the stereographic format. So, too, are the Vol. 28, No. 3 © 2014 Smithsonian Institution American Art | Fall 2014 29 changes visible across the two depictions of the couple—such as the position of the man’s hands and the folds of the woman’s dress—since the component photographs of a stereoview were taken by a camera whose dual lenses were positioned precisely two and a half inches apart to mimic human vision. It was the recombination of those photographs in a binocular viewer that yielded the desired three-dimensional effect. Taboo, therefore, may be a modernist interpretation of this early photographic form—one that, I will argue, was charged with political implications.4 1 Underwood & Underwood, Scholars have only begun to explore the ways photography acted on and through The Stereograph as an Educator, Lawrence’s oeuvre. They have done so by noting similar subject matter in Lawrence’s ca. 1901. Albumen prints mounted on stereocard, 3 x paintings and contemporary documentary photography, especially the work produced 6 in. or larger on 3 1/2 x 7 in. by white photographers under the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the mount. Library of Congress, Depression era. In her recent book Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-08781 for example, Patricia Hills cited the resemblances between the artist’s series The Migration of the Negro (1940–41), consisting of sixty captioned panels, and published collections of FSA photographs that recorded the lives of “ordinary” people across the United States, from Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938) to Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Because of their combination of image and text and their sharp focus on social transformations in the black community, Hills observed a special connec- tion between Lawrence’s Migration paintings and the book 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941), the result of a collaboration between the author Richard Wright and the photographer Edwin Rosskam.5 Press photographs depict- ing lunch counter sit-ins, efforts to desegregate public schools, Freedom Rides through the Deep South, resistance to police brutality, and other activities associated with the civil rights movement seem to have “triggered” later paintings, as Hills put it. Thus, we can read Lawrence’s Ordeal of Alice (1963, private collection) as conversing with a widely cir- culated news photograph by Pete Harris, which captured the harassment of a young black woman (Elizabeth Eckford) as she and eight others tried to attend Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. American Revolution (1963, private collection), moreover, refers to the famous pictures of police dogs and black protestors taken by the photojournalists Charles Moore and Bill Hudson in Birmingham, Alabama.6 Taboo is certainly part of that story, in which easel paintings and published news photographs contributed to public representations of black struggle and survival. In fact, it was included in Lawrence’s first solo show at Terry Dintenfass’s gallery in New York in 1963 alongside Ordeal of Alice and other artworks that engaged with the visual culture of the civil rights movement. It also belongs to another story, in which photographs repre- sented and functioned within private lives. The stereoview is one of many photographic forms that historians have described as vernacular, a category comprising apparently ordi- nary objects that belong to the material and visual culture of the everyday. In Lawrence’s world, those objects included commercial studio portraits and amateur snapshots of sentimental value to black families, framed and hung on walls or inserted in albums and viewed within homes; they were honorific depictions of quotidian black life that sustained and celebrated the African American community. Or, in the case of the stereoview, they 30 American Art | Fall 2014 were images produced outside that community that nevertheless exerted an influence on it—fantasies of domestic life that were manufactured for the viewing pleasure of a white middle class. In unpacking the layers of Taboo, the following pages shift the current conversation about Lawrence and photography to ask, how and to what ends did his engagement with photography incorporate specifically vernacular practices? Exploring that question involves looking closely at the largely unexamined references to such practices in paint- ings by Lawrence, beginning with his rendering of a Harlem street scene titled The Photographer (1942). This essay looks further into what Hills has dubbed the “thick context” out of which his work emerged, a context composed of the “complex interaction of events, of the visual and oral culture of Harlem, of people important to his artistic life”—and, I would add, a framework in which photography played an especially impor- tant role.7 My aims are thus twofold: to shed new light on an understudied aspect of Lawrence’s painting; and to expand our understanding of how and why modern African American art has reached across the history of photography. Eyes of a Camera “The streets of Harlem—their movement, the people, the local color, and the sounds— became a bottomless source of visual and spiritual inspiration for Lawrence,” Leslie King-Hammond notes of the artist’s early paintings in the exhibition catalogue Over the Line. “His ability to tell the story of a community visually revealed his capacity for observation and acute attention to detail.” Choosing an apt metaphor for the subject at hand, King-Hammond concluded: “Everywhere Lawrence went, his eyes were a camera, and scene after scene fed his artistic appetite.”8 Other scholars have similarly portrayed the artist as an active spectator of life in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s, noting that the subjects he saw there made their way into his artwork. Lawrence was, of course, not alone in closely observing and documenting his neighbor- hood, which was undergoing profound social and technological changes at the time. As the literary historian Sara Blair has pointed out, Harlem after 1935 became “a site that afforded charged visual opportunities, spectacles, evidence, found objects, and decisive moments”—moments that were recorded with unprecedented regularity by men (and some women) armed with cameras, eager to shoot.9 Among these photographers were those hired by the federal government to record urban and rural life by seeking out the “decisive moments” in daily life and to share those visions with the middle-class readers of illustrated magazines and visitors to major art museums. So it was in Life and the Museum of Modern Art that Jacob Lawrence would have encountered documentary photographs of Harlem during his early career.
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