ART REVIEW : Panels Take a Small Look at Large Lives : ‘Narrative Paintings’ Portray Abolitionists

Of the two series of narrative paintings by Jacob Lawrence now being shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the second is the most powerful and revealing.

The first, which uses 32 small panels to outline the life of the great 19th-Century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, shows an artist in the throes of learning how to compose pictures for his chosen format. Often the compositions are cramped, clumsy and unfocused, as if Lawrence were having trouble identifying the significance of the episodes in Douglass’ life, except from a dryly historical perspective.

The second series, which outlines the life of Harriet Tubman in 31 small panels, shows a startling sea-change. It’s as if a cleansing breeze has blown through, and Lawrence has suddenly connected with his subject’s buoyant and invigorating example. With great skill, and even flashes of brilliance, Lawrence merges the heroic saga of the 19th-Century’s other great abolitionist with his own developing story as an artist.

“Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of Narrative Paintings” has been touring for more than two years. The compact exhibition was organized by the Hampton, Va., University Museum, in whose collection the paintings have been held since their 1967 gift to the museum from the Harmon Foundation, established in 1926 to support African-American art.

The connection with the Harmon Foundation is apt, since the remarkable Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was the basis on which Lawrence was to build his art. Born in Atlantic City in 1917, he moved to Harlem with his family at age 13. Lawrence was too young to have been a participant in forging the New Negro Movement’s eager fusion of Realist style, Americanist philosophy and ethnic consciousness. Aaron Douglas, chief theoretician of the visual arts for the Harlem Renaissance, was 18 years his senior.

But that’s the point. Lawrence entered a world in which mature concepts of art and cultural identity were a given--the first such moment in black American history. He inserted himself into an established tradition, however new that tradition was, and he remade it to his own ends.

Lawrence was just 21 when he began the Douglass series. Like countless American artists who would subsequently emerge into major significance, he was sustained during those brutal years of the Great Depression by the nation’s first foray into government support for the arts, the WPA’s historic Federal Art Project.

The Douglass pictures were not his first series. A year earlier Lawrence had completed “Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1937-38), chronicling the former slave who had brought independence to Haiti.

Nor was the Tubman series his last. “The Migration of the Negro” and “John Brown” followed in 1940 and 1941.

The Douglass and Tubman pictures are especially significant, though, and not just because the lives of these two Maryland slaves were to intersect in the fight for human liberty. Together they represent the initial transition of Lawrence’s art from a minor to a major key. They’re crucial signposts in the developing life of an important young artist.

The paintings in both are all of an identical size--12 inches by 17 7/8 inches--although some are deployed horizontally, some vertically. The medium is the same too: casein tempera, a milk-based paint whose dry, flat colors have a soft richness.

The two narrative series are laid out like frames in a storybook, each image set off by a narrow white border, marked out in pencil. Imagine a merger between a children’s reader and Giotto’s great narrative of the life of Christ in Padua’s Arena Chapel.

In fact, the Harriet Tubman series does incorporate numerous references to Christian iconography: the snake in the Garden is echoed in a panel that shows young Harriet sprawled on the ground, having been struck in the head by a slave master’s overseer; the Crucifixion in a panel that shows a whipped slave, accompanied by an ugly quote from statesman Henry Clay rationalizing why descendants of Africans must be sacrificed for American liberty; the Pieta in a panel that represents Tubman nursing a fallen Union soldier.

The result is a saga that feels larger than any single individual. This sense is also heightened by a surprising anonymity: It’s Tubman’s story, but never is portraiture a consideration.

When Harriet is first introduced in panel four, she’s unidentifiable among a playful group of children. In the graphically powerful picture in which she saws logs, her bowed head completely obscures her face. Elsewhere, she’s hidden by her hands or a shawl or her face is rendered schematically. The narrative says “Harriet Tubman,” but Lawrence makes her Everywoman too.

A mythic grandeur rapidly overtakes the otherwise humble series. The gravity is heightened by Lawrence’s simplified, but never simplistic, style. The log-sawing panel is perhaps the most extraordinarily composed, with the stark shapes of Tubman’s powerful body massed against a brown hill in the background.

The leftward slope of the hill cuts across the rightward slope of Tubman’s big shoulders, creating a visual seesaw evocative of the forceful, up-and-down motion that describes her tedious work. Tubman’s strength and diligence, which served her well in her subsequent years smuggling fugitive slaves northward on the underground railroad, is conveyed with a marvelous specificity.

It’s also significant that Lawrence was painting the series late in the 1930s. The lingering trauma of the Great Depression built pressure for jingoist conformity, which was the antithesis of these pictorial celebrations of the great American tradition of civil disobedience.

The earlier Douglass series has its moments, as in a joyously luxurious image of a slave master’s bedroom. It demonstrates Lawrence’s clear adoration for the vivid art of Matisse.

But, mostly you feel as if the young painter is trying things out. Some work, some don’t. Not until the Tubman series has he assimilated those experiments and begun to make them his own.

Finally Lawrence loosens the tight, illustrational reigns of his narrative project, which had held the Douglass pictures in check. The Tubman series claims a half-dozen panels of exceptional pictorial invention, many evocative of the great Modernist painter Arthur Dove.

These panels, several almost wholly abstract, provide eloquent testimony of an artist deeply immersed in a heady process of self-discovery and self-invention. It’s exactly the process that had transformed the ancestral heroine that is the paintings’ subject. From one series to the next, the youthful Jacob Lawrence internalized a history he had merely set out to celebrate.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Aug. 22. Closed Mondays.