CLASS and SOCIETY: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN REALISM and PHOTOGRAPHY: FOCUS (Regionalism, the Harlem Renaissance, and American Photography) ONLINE ASSIGNMENT: http://www.phillipscollection.org/r esearch/american_art/artwork/La wrence-Migration_Series1.htm TITLE or DESIGNATION: Migration of the Negro series ARTIST: Jacob Lawrence CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: Early American Modernism DATE: 1940-1941 C.E. MEDIUM: tempera on hardboard ONLINE ASSIGNMENT: http://smarthistory.khanac ademy.org/american- regionalism-grant-woods- american-gothic.html TITLE or DESIGNATION: American Gothic ARTIST: Grant Wood CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: American Regionalism DATE: 1930 C. E. MEDIUM: oil on beaverboard ONLINE ASSIGNMENT: http://smarthistory.khan academy.org/hoppers- nighthawks.html TITLE or DESIGNATION: Nighthawks ARTIST: Edward Hopper CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: Twentieth-Century American Realism DATE: 1942 C.E. MEDIUM: oil on canvas TITLE or DESIGNATION: Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley ARTIST: Dorothea Lange CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: Twentieth-Century American Photography DATE: 1935 C. E. MEDIUM: gelatin silver print CLASS and SOCIETY: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN REALISM and PHOTOGRAPHY: SELECTED TEXT (Regionalism, the Harlem Renaissance, and American Photography) EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN REALISM and PHOTOGRAPHY Online Links: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series - Philiips Collection Hopper's Nighthawks – Smarthistory Grant Wood's American Gothic Grant Wood's American Gothic - Art Institute of Chicago Top Left: Duke Ellington; Bottom Left: Alain Locke Harlem’s wealthy middle-class African- American community produced some of the nation’s most talented artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the jazz musician Duke Ellington, the novelist Jean Toomer, and the poet Langston Hughes. The movement’s intellectual leader was Alain Locke (1886-1954), a critic and philosopher professor who argued that black artists should seek their artistic roots in the traditional arts of Africa rather than assimilate within mainstream American or European artistic traditions. James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), a studio photographer who took carefully crafted portraits of the Harlem upper middle- classes, opened his studio in 1916, working both as a news reporter and a society photographer. James Van Der Zee. Couple Wearing Raccoon Coats with a Cadillac, taken on West 127th Street, Harlem, New York, 1932, gelatin silver print Couple Wearing Raccoon Coats with a Cadillac captures a wealthy man and woman posing with their new car in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. The photograph reveals the glamor of Harlem then the center of African-American cultural life. Above: Lawrence teaching school children at the Abraham Lincoln School African American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) moved to Harlem, New York, in 1927 while still a boy. There, he came under the spell of the African art and the African American history he found in lectures and exhibitions and in the special programs sponsored by the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, which had outstanding collections of African American art and archival data. Jacob Lawrence. Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 1, 1940-41, Casein tempera on hardboard When Lawrence began painting The Migration of the Negro in 1940, it was his most ambitious project to date, amplifying his earlier genre scenes and historical series on Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. Broad in scope and dramatic in exposition, this depiction of African- Americans moving North to find jobs, better housing, and freedom from oppression was a subject he associated with his parents, who had themselves migrated from South Carolina to Virginia, and finally, to New York. Top left: Jacob Lawrence. Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 2, 1940-41, Casein tempera on hardboard Bottom Left: Fifteenth-century painting by Sassetta at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Lawrence began to research the subject at the 135th Street Library in 1939. After many months of reading and taking notes, he made sketches for the series. Gwendolyn Knight, a painter who was to become his wife, helped him identify memorable scenes and assisted in gessoing the panels and writing the inscriptions. Enthralled by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings he had seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lawrence used their medium— tempera—with a craftsman's mastery. To keep the colors consistent, he placed the panels side by side and painted each hue onto all the panels before going on to the next color. Perhaps it was this approach that resulted in a sense of collective unity, even though each panel can stand on its own. Top left: Jacob Lawrence. Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 3, 1940-41, Casein tempera on hardboard Searing in their immediacy, the works show only essential imagery. Flattened, angular forms, strong diagonals, and contrasts of light and shadow contribute to the dynamism of the images. Although Lawrence used a limited palette, he arranged the colors to form focal points to direct the viewer's attention. Some pictures are self-contained; others are more expansive. As the narrative unfolds, from image to image, the vantage point, compositions, and details change—in a manner reminiscent of a film. In some panels, figures dominate; in others, the setting propels the story. The people are not individualized; rather, they represent collective characteristics. However, Lawrence never lost sight of the human drama. In all of his work, the human content is paramount. Bottom Left: Jacob Lawrence. Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 51, 1940-41, Casein tempera on hardboard Lawrence varied his emphasis to reveal the depth of the story. Motion and anticipation are dramatically conveyed in Panel No. 3, where the pyramid of people, gazing beyond the picture's edge, forcefully echoes the arrangement of the flying birds. The empty space connotes an unknown future. In contrast, the nightmarish scene in Panel No. 51 reduces the human presence to a few silhouettes in the windows of burning buildings, an indication that the migrants did not always find a better life. Jacob Lawrence. Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 58, 1940-41, Casein tempera on hardboard After Reconstruction (following the Civil War), southern educational facilities were segregated and schools for blacks were poorly maintained, meagerly equipped, and overcrowded. In 1916, The United States Bureau of Education found that annual per capita spending for education in southern states averaged $10.32 for whites, but only $2.89 for blacks. Although the school system in the North was also segregated, here the schools for blacks had better equipment and more staff than their southern counterparts. Northern states also had compulsory education laws, which encouraged students to stay in school, instead of dropping out and working as southern blacks often did. Nearly twice as many black students completed high school in the North than in the South. While Lawrence explored the false promises of the North, some of his Migration Series paintings present the hope for something better: greater access to education, greater work opportunities, and the freedom to vote. In this image, Lawrence composed the classroom environment as a "landscape" where the importance of education and growth, especially for girls, is emphasized. Above: Mural by Jose Clemente Orozco Left: Aaron Douglas. Judgment Day, 1927, gouache on paper Inspired by the politically oriented art of Goya Daumier, and Orozco, and influenced by the many artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance whom he met, including Aaron Douglas, Lawrence found his subjects in the everyday life of Harlem and African American history. Jacob Lawrence. Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 51, 1940-41, Casein tempera on hardboard In the Migration Series, No. 49 bears the caption “They also found discrimination in the North although it was much different from that which they had known in the South.” Lawrence depicted a blatantly segregated dining room with a barrier running down the room’s center separating the whites on the left from the African Americans on the right. To ensure a continuity and visual integrity among all 60 paintings, Lawrence interpreted his themes systematically in rhythmic arrangements of bold, flat, and strongly colored shapes. His style drew equally from his interest in the push- pull effects of Cubist space and his memories of the patterns made by the colored scatter rugs brightening the floors of his childhood homes. He unified the narrative with a consistent palette of bluish green, orange, yellow, and grayish brown throughout the entire series. The constant influx of black migrants into northern cities led to unprecedented levels of hostility on the part of northern whites. Restrictive housing, living, and working policies abounded. The city of San Francisco sent experts to the Midwest to study techniques and strategies of exclusion. Black migrants were often segregated into the most dilapidated sections of the city, forced to pay high prices for inferior housing, and discriminated against in the workplace. Widespread unrest over these conditions was unleashed during summer race riots in 1919. Blacks and whites are divided here by a yellow barrier that zigzags through the center of the painting. The yellow dividing line is emphasized by the tilted table tops and chairs situated against the background of the restaurant floor. This familiar image was exhibited publicly for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago, winning a three-hundred-dollar prize and instant fame for Grant Wood. The impetus for the painting came while Wood was visiting the small town of Eldon in his native Iowa. There he spotted a little wood farmhouse, with a single oversized window, made in a style called Carpenter Gothic. “I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house,” he said. He used his sister and his dentist as models for a farmer and his daughter, dressing them as if they were “tintypes from my old family album.” Grant Wood.