A PAINTERLY PANORAMA OF PAIN

This entire page could be filled with Jacob Lawrence’s achievements--awards and honorary degrees he has won, offices and teaching posts he has held, his commissions for murals, posters and magazine covers, not to mention his exhibitions.

There are his honorary doctorates at Carnegie-Mellon and Howard universities, his teaching at the fabled Black Mountain School in 1946 with Bauhaus master Josef Albers and his ongoing association with the University of Washington. There’s the 1970 Time magazine cover of Jesse Jackson. And, among dozens of shows in prestigious places, his 1974 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

But let’s not get into that. You would be bored, Lawrence would be embarrassed and we’d never get around to the art that has earned him so much attention.

His work is a personal form of Expressionism that reverberates with black social consciousness. An essentially self-taught painter of genre and historical narratives, he has developed a dynamic style of painting vivid, hard-edge shapes of interlocking color. His best works have the graphic clout of posters and the sting of painful memories.

One of the best known black painters in America, the 69-year-old artist is to the nation what the late Charles White has been to Los Angeles: a consummate professional and compassionate human being whose art seems to have sprung from social awareness. Their styles differ, but both have exerted enormous influence through their teaching, community involvement and personal contacts. Both have large audiences that have been profoundly affected by the artists’ positive visions of blacks’ struggles.

“Jacob Lawrence: American Painter,” a retrospective exhibition at the Oakland Museum (through Nov. 30), reaffirms the artist’s stature. Not that many were inclined to doubt it, but Lawrence is still categorized as a black artist, which means that his work hasn’t been woven into the fabric of American art history as securely as it ought to be.

Detractors can argue that Lawrence’s art follows such an unwavering path as to appear limited. The bold colors, crisp shapes, exaggerated gestures, high vantage points and graphic clarity that make the work instantly recognizable as Lawrence’s can be seen as a formula--a sort of endless reworking of design problems.

The trouble with those quibbles is that they tend to consider form without content, which is not the way we see Lawrence’s paintings. If nothing else, he delivers a unified message. We get the picture at precisely the same moment as we see how it is constructed. And more often that not, the image is authentically moving. Even when his early art veers toward caricature it is still palpably real and human.

Some of Lawrence’s paintings undoubtedly will bring tears to the eyes of people who have shared portrayed experiences--and smiles to the faces of those who have felt the frenzied spirit of urban street life. Even those who approach this art from a distance are not likely to forget the weight of chained feet in Lawrence’s “Harriet Tubman” series, the poignancy of his account of blacks’ northern migration or the horrifying desolation of his recent “Hiroshima” silk-screen prints (done for the Limited Editions Club’s 1982 publication of John Hersey’s book on the atomic bombing).

Lawrence’s depiction of black history and contemporary life is all the stronger because he doesn’t manipulate it into memory by means of sentiment or bombast. The fact that his figures are not likenesses doesn’t indicate a lack of drawing ability so much as an intent to let specific incidents and people speak about universal issues.

From the beginning, Lawrence painted with water-based mediums on small pieces of paper or board. His paintings remain muscular but surprisingly tender pictures whose modesty extends to materials. Though his scale has grown (occasionally to mural size) and he has worked with gouache, egg tempera, casein and silkscreen, apparently he has felt no need for the cachet of oil on canvas.

Lawrence paints what he knows through experience or research. He certainly has a social agenda, but the tone is as fundamentally hopeful as the images are unflinching. Except for his devastating view of ravaged flesh and walking corpses in “Hiroshima,” he comes across as a believer in the perfectibility of humanity.

Devoid of irony and utterly unconcerned with smart art “issues,” this work is completely out of fashion. Which is to say in part that it goes about its business directly, communicating in a visual language that doesn’t require viewers to have an art education.

Lawrence developed his way of working in the dark of Depression-era Harlem and the light of encouragement from older artists. He took his bright colors from the inexpensive decor of neighborhood dwellings, his street scenes from sights that surrounded him. His optimism may be the result of having won support and recognition early and often. Though he was born with a plastic spoon in his mouth (to a mother who wished he would pursue something practical), Lawrence credits black artists in Harlem with embracing his talents, letting him develop his individual style and pushing him in productive directions.

Writing exhaustively about Lawrence in the exhibition catalogue, curator Ellen Harkins Wheat talks of “overnight acclaim” for the first exhibition (in 1941) of his “Migration of the Negro” series. She says his “career has been singularly free of disappointment and controversy,” supporting that startling assertion with accounts of accolades and achievements as well as the artist’s own declarations of fortunate circumstances. The surest way to keep the rosy biography in perspective is to realize just how slowly a few black artists have worked their way into the mainstream of opportunities and recognition.

The retrospective, organized by the Seattle Art Museum (and traveling on to the High Museum in Atlanta, the Phillips Collection in Washington, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum), contains 147 works done from 1936 to 1985. They run from spicy, primitive street scenes to sophisticated plans for murals at Howard University.

His work is never more likable than those early paintings of shameless prostitutes hanging out on a restaurant stoop or stuffing money in a stocking, but it grows quite dramatically in complexity. Flat, solid-color shapes with slits of light defining their contours are replaced by faceted, Cubist forms. In a few later works, Lawrence seems to be having such a good time with his acquired facility that he sets crisp little chunks of color to fluttering across thesurfaces of his paintings--and undercuts his sure sense of composition.

As he became engrossed in telling the stories of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Toussaint l’Ouverture and other activists in blacks’ struggles for freedom and equal opportunity, he adopted a narrative format. Lawrence never really learned to mix colors, model a rounded form, or paint in a conventional manner. He would draw all the images in a series, then work on them all at once, filling in one solid color on all the panels before proceeding to the next hue.

Genre scenes--a barber shop, a piano lesson, a school room or women ironing--often inspired independent pictures. So did news events. “Confrontation at the Bridge,” a Bicentennial commission depicting a tightly packed crowd of black people held at bay by a snarling dog, is based on “Bull” Connor’s 1963 arrest of civil rights workers in Birmingham, Ala.

Lawrence’s distinctive style has been called such things as Collage Cubism, Carpenter Cubism and Social-Realist Expressionism. Though it has varied, waxing streaky in the “Harriet Tubman Series,” darkly ominous in the “War Series” and decoratively patterned in paintings of theatrical productions and Nigerian markets, it always belongs to Lawrence.

One of the most notable changes is a shift toward subtlety in his “Builders” series which the artist says symbolizes “man’s aspiration, as a constructive tool.” Lawrence has pursued the theme since moving to Seattle in 1970, to become a professor at the University of Washington.

The soft colors and misty atmosphere of the Northwest seem to have softened his palette. He raises his lofty viewpoint even higher and adopts a more philosophical tone. But the art still falls in line with fundamental Lawrence. An artist who managed to uncover hope in the most appalling moments of his people’s history might be expected to find dignity in labor.