DAYTRIPPER-OCTOBER
 DayTripper: Jacob Lawrence at The Phillips Collection
Migration Stories
by Judy Pomeranz
On 60 carefully gessoed panels, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) set out to relate a defining episode in U.S. history. It was the story of a million black Americans at a particular moment in time, but Lawrence saw it as a timeless tale of Americans in general, a narrative we each live out in our own unique way and at a time determined by fate. It is the story of movement.
Lawrence’s monumental Migration Series depicts the movement of African Americans from the South to the North in the years immediately following the outbreak of World War I. These migrants sought economic opportunity and social justice; they sought freedom and a new way of life. They made the trip, generally successfully, and indeed found a new life, but one which of course came with its own set of problems.
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Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to parents who had journeyed from Virginia and South Carolina, Lawrence grew up in Philadelphia and Harlem among people who spoke frequently of their journeys. The migration story was an important part of his life and his culture. Having begun art studies as a boy in daycare at Utopia Children’s House and continuing on at the WPA Harlem Art Workshop under Charles Alston, Lawrence learned at an early age that his own most effective means of articulation and storytelling was through a visual medium. Before his twenty-second birthday, he had created multi-panel narratives about Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. And at age 23, thanks to a Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship awarded for the purpose, he completed what would come to be known as his magnum opus, The Migration Series. He didn’t create it for exhibition, he said, never mind sale, but simply because he had something to say.
And it seemed it was something others wanted to listen to, because the entire series was immediately placed on exhibit by the important New York dealer, Edith Halpert, and was the subject of great interest. Halpert agreed with Lawrence that the 60 panels should not be sold off piecemeal, which might have been very profitable indeed, but should be kept intact and sold (or not) as a single work. But a compromise was made when two institutions of unique influence and authority in the world of modernism–The Phillips Collection and The Museum of Modern Art–both showed interest.
The compromise involved allowing each institution to purchase 30 panels, the even numbered panels going to MoMA and the odd to the Phillips, which is where the paintings respectively reside to this day. While each institution cherishes its own cache, it also occasionally agrees to release its collection to the other, so the public can appreciate the series in its entirety. We are now privileged to be able to see the works housed together at the Phillips.
The paintings are characterized by a wonderful combination of abstraction and realism and by an amazing degree of stylistic unity. Each 12-by-18-panel (some painted with a horizontal orientation and some vertical) relates a scene from the story of the African-American migration from North to South and comes with a short, simple explanatory caption. Each is painted in broad areas of strongly contoured, flat color, creating an almost collage-like or jigsaw puzzle effect. The colors are mostly pure and unmodulated.
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There is a starkness and simplicity to the works that might at first put one in mind of folk art, but the compositional integrity and sophistication as well as the importance of the message being delivered place these paintings squarely in the realm of semi-abstract modernism.
The images, like the words in the captions, are delivered with a disarmingly deadpan straightforwardness. There is nothing the least bit melodramatic in these simple images accompanied by simple words, which oddly makes their emotional impact all the greater. A picture of gray bricks or building blocks interrupted only by a window at which we see two hands clutching onto black bars says all anyone could want to know about run-ins with law enforcement authorities. A Mondrian-esque image of simple vertical buildings with rectangular, primary-colored windows expresses perfectly how the generic urban landscape of the North must have seemed to the new migrants. And the same type of buildings with red, yellow and blue flames shooting out of them effectively tells the story of the kind of horrific welcome the migrants sometimes received upon moving into their new homes.
The people in the paintings are defined not by facial features but by posture and gesture. They are little more than filled-out stick figures, lacking any specifically identifying characteristics, and as such they fulfill their function of standing in for a sort of Everyman.
Which is exactly what Lawrence intended, for this work not only tells a particular story but addresses an important part of our collective unconscious, namely the migration experience, writ large. For movement is a major component of American life, whether from place to place or experience to experience, and we all have migration stories to tell.
So, this is a work with inherent universal appeal, both in its message and in its aesthetic, and is built on the simplest of colors and shapes that make up all others in the visual world. It is a work to which children relate just as much as adults, and a work that brings out the story and the storyteller in everyone who takes the time to engage with it. It is most assuredly a work worth spending time with at this rare moment when we can see it in its entirety.
The Migration Series is on view at The Phillips Collection through October 26. For further information, phone 202-387-2151, or visit www.phillipscollection.org.
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