Jacob Lawrence, whose colorful paintings chronicled the history of black America with subtle emotion and evocative simplicity, died Friday of lung cancer at his home in Seattle. He was 82.
A National Medal of Arts winner in 1990, under President Bush, Lawrence was loved not only for his work but also for his generosity and kindness to those he met, particularly in the black community."Jake was arguably the most important African-American artist of the 20th century," said Richard J. Powell, chairman of the department of art and art history at Duke University and a frequent writer on black art.
From his teenage years, Lawrence was highly regarded in the prolific art circles of Depression-era Harlem. Influenced by both Matisse and the Cubists in his planar figural images, Lawrence was admired for his vibrant imagery as well as his commitment to social causes.
He first earned wide recognition at age 24, for his "Migration Series" depicting the lives of blacks who moved from the rural South to the industrial North in the early 20th century. He painted the 60 small panels in 1941 in an $8-a-month studio in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, but soon after his series was published in Fortune Magazine it was quickly sold to two major art museums -- half to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and half to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
Since then he has been recognized as a significant figure in American art.
Despite being diagnosed with lung cancer three years ago, Lawrence continued painting until a few weeks ago, according to Peter Nesbett, director of the Jacob Lawrence Family Foundation.
The artist just completed a design for a major mural commission for Times Square that is expected to be installed in New York next year. He also recently finished a series of paintings on games -- a frequent subject -- including people playing pool, chess and checkers.
The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., was already working on a major retrospective of Lawrence's work and will open it in 2001 before traveling throughout the United States.
Nesbett said that while Lawrence helped chronicle his own history, the artist was always less interested in his legacy than the future., even though he knew that having cancer would affect his life span --
Throughout his 65-year career, Lawrence focused on figure painting and was not swayed by the rise of abstraction, even at its peak in the era of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.
Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born in 1917 in Atlantic City, N.J., to parents who had migrated from the South during World War I. His family later moved to rural Pennsylvania and then to Philadelphia, where his parents separated. After spending several years in foster homes with his brother and sister, at age 13 he joined his mother in Harlem where he worked as a delivery boy to help support his family.
In 1938, he went to work for the WPA Federal Art Project as a painter. He was, he later said, "too young for a wall," referring to the myriad commissioned murals produced during the Depression by WPA artists.
He often worked in series, including works on Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.
During the 1940s and '50s, he exhibited regularly in museums and among his subjects were performances at the Apollo theater in Harlem and New York City street life.
Lawrence was also known for his teaching, visiting public schools using his own work as a young artist as a educational tool and in 1946, teaching at the renowned Black Mountain College near Ashville, N.C.
In 1971, he accepted a tenured position at the University of Washington, Seattle, from which he retired in 1986.
Lawrence is survived by his wife of 59 years, Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence.