Art: Stories with Impact

Jacob Lawrence, 35, is the nation's (and probably the world's) foremost Negro painter. Yet his draftsmanship would hardly earn passing grades at an academic art school; his painting technique is dry, flat, hesitant; his colors are sometimes dirty, sometimes neon-bright, always arbitrary.

What makes Lawrence so good is the simple fact that he is his own man—a rare thing for an artist, even in the U.S. and in the 20th century. His painting ideas are fresh-minted, borrowed from nobody (with the possible and rare exception of Orozco). He never tries to buy attention with smooth-rubbed clichés. He suppresses every detail that fails to contribute to the immediate impact of his pictures, makes every gesture count.

Primarily a storytelling artist, he has no doubt at all that "the human subject is the most important thing." Until very recently, the stories Lawrence told were grim and tough. Depression-schooled, he first won fame in 1941 with a series of 60 small panels describing the northward migration of Negro workers that began during World War I. Washington's Phillips Memorial Gallery and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art both bid for the entire series, and regretfully divided it. The generally bored and blase "art world" warmed at once to the bullet-headed youth, who got his early art training in a Harlem settlement house, and whose temperament was intense to the point of rawness.

Lawrence followed his first success with a group of pictures illustrating the life of John Brown, others describing Harlem and the Deep South, and then two series based on his service in the Coast Guard. In 1949 he voluntarily entered a mental hospital for therapy, emerged with the makings of a somber group entitled Sanitarium. His latest series, on view at a Manhattan gallery this week, is a contrastingly lighthearted view of the entertainment world. A standout in the show is reproduced on the following page.

The painter describes his Vaudeville as "my memories of the Apollo Theater at 125th Street . . . real vaudeville ... I wasn't thinking of any particular act. The decorated panel behind? I never saw it; I made it up. You can't just put together things you've seen. I wanted a staccato-type thing— raw, sharp, rough— that's what I tried to get."