Struggle Session

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2020

Struggle Session

On “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Where could Jacob Lawrence go after “The Migration Series”? Lawrence’s trailblazing work of sixty paintings, originally called “The Migration of the Negro,” pulled together the story of the Great Migration into a visual American epic. Painted all at once, color by color, the episodic panels present the early twentieth-century movement of black Americans from the rural South to the industrial North as a puzzle of dynamic shapes and vibrant hues. Accompanied by Lawrence’s tightly researched narrative, which supplies the title for each panel, the distilled forms tie the compositions together while connecting the episodes into a unified and abstracted whole.

Sponsored by the Rosenwald Foundation, the series of 1940–41 launched Lawrence from the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, where he conducted his historical research, to national acclaim. After showing at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery—Lawrence was the first black American to be represented by a New York gallery—the series was acquired in its entirety through a joint institutional purchase. The odd numbered panels went to Washington’s Phillips Collection; the evens went to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Lawrence was just twenty-three years old.

The moving power of this dynamic work is revealed every time the series is reunited—most recently in “One-Way Ticket,” the exhibition that was on view at MOMA in 2015. Writing of an earlier reunion, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, Hilton Kramer noted that

into each image, executed in tempera, gouache or watercolor, is distilled a dramatic episode or emotion of great simplicity, yet the crowded succession of such images traces a complex course. . . . Drawing is reduced to the delineation of flat shapes and easily read gestures. Figures are seen as the sum of their actions, never as individualized personalities. Color is generally somber, yet illuminated by moments of gemlike intensity. There is an extraordinary velocity in this style and an extraordinary empathy. It succeeds in creating a world, and it holds us in its grip.

Lawrence was the product of the same Great Migration he depicted. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917, at thirteen he continued the family’s migration north, moving with his mother and sister to Harlem. A child prodigy, he soon apprenticed with Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, and other leading artistic lights of the Harlem Renaissance. By the late 1930s, he was already channeling the cosmopolitan worldview of Alain Locke’s “New Negro” into the easel division of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. Inspired by the figures of black history, he created narrative portraits of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Painted in a flurry of activity, spread out all together across his Harlem studio, “The Migration Series” connected Lawrence’s personal subject matter with the wandering and restless spirit of modernism. It was exhibited in the same year he married his fellow Harlem artist Gwendolyn Knight. No other work of such ambitious scope would come quite as easily to Lawrence again. His cycle on “The Legend of John Brown” of 1941, which now exists mainly as a series of twenty-two prints, tells its story more on the surface, without quite the same compositional nuance or absorption.

Now that he was exhibiting beyond “uptown,” the Downtown Gallery (which was, by then, located in midtown on East Fifty-first Street) exposed Lawrence to Halpert’s circle of modernist American painters. These figures included Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, and Charles Sheeler. In such standalone and standout paintings as Pool Parlor of 1942, a prizewinner of an “Artists for Victory” competition and purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art that same year, Lawrence already can be seen building on his expanding modernist horizons. Four years later, an invitation to teach at Black Mountain College further elevated Lawrence into the orbit of Josef Albers and the international modernism of the Bauhaus.

At the same time, in addition to widening his artistic outlook, the 1940s exposed Lawrence to a broadening American landscape. For over two years during World War II, Lawrence served in the United States Coast Guard under the command of Carlton Skinner on USS Sea Cloud. The vessel was the country’s first racially integrated ship in wartime service. It later became a model for the armed services’ post-war integration in 1948, and by extension the country’s federal de-segregationist policies of the 1950s.

Here Lawrence achieved the rank of Specialist Third Class. He served as an official combat artist, creating some seventeen paintings. Most of these paintings were lost in the subsequent demobilization, but at one time they were exhibited alongside his “Migration Series” in an exhibition organized by MOMA and championed by the Coast Guard. As MOMA compared the two bodies of work at the time, “almost imperceptibly his Coast Guard paintings suggest the gradual beginnings of a solution to the problem so movingly portrayed in the Migration Series.”

In Lawrence’s Coast Guard pictures both races face the same fundamental problem—the war. Colored and white men mingle in recreational sports on deck, eat together, work together. Colored and white hands reach out with equal eagerness at mail call. Death and injury play no favorites, and all Uncle Sam’s nephews rate the same pay in their non-racial classifications.

Lawrence’s experience in a fully integrated America, at least as reflected on board this singular ship, helped encourage him to revisit the episodes of American history through a new integrationist perspective. In 1950 he even saw fit to call the Coast Guard “the best democracy I’ve ever known.” During a yearlong period of mental convalescence, which he spent reading Walt Whitman, Lawrence developed a vision for a new and newly ambitious cycle of paintings. “As I read more of the history of the United States,” he wrote in one grant application of 1954, “I gradually began to appreciate not only the struggles and contributions of the Negro people, but also to appreciate the rich and exciting story of America and of all the peoples who emigrated to the ‘New World’ and contributed to the creation of the United States.” Lawrence now sought to capture “man’s constant search for the perfect society in which to live” by visualizing the “struggles, contributions, and ingenuity of the American people.”

“Struggle: From the History of the American People,” Lawrence’s title for this new series, attempted to take the structure of “The Migration Series,” down to its sixty-panel sequence, and apply the artist’s updated modernist idioms to capturing the full scope of American history. The series would again return Lawrence to the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library for research, this time commuting from his brownstone in Brooklyn. Again Lawrence applied for foundation support to underwrite the project, and again he hoped a great institution, or two, would purchase the series, keeping it together in sequence.

“Struggle” proved to be an all-too-appropriate title for Lawrence’s epic undertaking of the 1950s. Years in the making, the series was only ever half completed. Lawrence finally cut short its full scope and abandoned the project entirely in the mid-1960s. Foundation supporters also proved to be few and far between. An application to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation was denied. And although now represented by the Alan Gallery, an offshoot of Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, Lawrence found no institutional buyers. Eventually the work was dispersed. Today five of the panels have yet to be located.

Jacob Lawrence, In all your intercourse with the natives, treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit . . . —Jefferson to Lewis & Clark, 1803, 1956, Egg tempera on hardboard. Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. Photo: Bob Packert/PEM; © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“Struggle” also speaks to the arrival of this body of work in a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.1 A show that took over six years to assemble, due in no small part to the painstaking task of locating these scattered panels, the exhibition was further delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which shuttered the Metropolitan for nearly six months. Now, finally, for the first time since 1958, this somber and stirring exhibition, organized by Massachusetts’s Peabody Essex Museum and co-curated by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron Bailly, reunites this work in the city of its creation.

Compared to the jigsaw pieces of “Migration,” “Struggle” presents an even more complex puzzle of compositional ingenuity. Lines slash and divide narrative elements. Gradated shapes churn the surface of the panels into tumbling abstracted constructions that nearly come apart. Sharpness and edge are defining characteristics as the blood drips and sprays. As with “Migration,” a narrative provides the title for each panel. This time it is often in the first person, with fragments from Patrick Henry through Henry Clay amplifying the immediacy of the American cry.

Lawrence’s particular focus is America’s wartime bravery and sacrifice. One quote, . . . again the rebels rushed furiously on our men—a Hessian soldier, supplies the title for Panel 8 (1954), a riot of clashing cavalry, bayonets, and swords. If we fail, let us fail like men, and expire together in one common struggle. . . —Henry Clay, 1813 forms the caption of Panel 23 (1956), as a solitary sailor bleeds out of his punctured eye in an abstraction of sharply torn sails. I cannot speak sufficiently in praise of the firmness and deliberation with which my whole line received their approach. . . —Andrew Jackson, New Orleans, 1815 describes Panel 25 (1956), as a garrison of bloody and bandaged American soldiers defend Fort St. Philip against a ten-day British bombardment.

Jacob Lawrence, We crossed the River at McKonkey’s Ferry 9 miles above Trenton . . . the night was excessively severe . . . which the men bore without the least murmur . . . —Tench Tilghman, 27 December 1776, 1954, Egg tempera on hardboard. Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. Photo: Bob Packert/PEM; © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“Lawrence was a remarkable artist—as remarkable for his independence as for his pictorial gifts,” Kramer wrote in revisiting an exhibition of the artist in 2001, a year after his death. In “Struggle,” Lawrence takes the images of American history, both well-known and under-known, and strips them of their nostalgia. Rather than the history painting of Emanuel Leutze or even Grant Wood, here is history made present through painting. Rather than regal splendor, Lawrence’s own depiction of Washington’s Crossing, Panel 10 of 1954, refuses to distinguish its citizen soldiers huddled in the abstracted waves of the Delaware River from their general. Here the title comes from a solemn journal entry of Washington’s aide-de-camp: We crossed the River at McKonkey’s Ferry 9 miles above Trenton . . . the night was excessively severe . . . which the men bore without the least murmur . . .—Tench Tilghman, 27 December 1776.

Never at odds, Lawrence unites black struggle with American struggle. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? —Patrick Henry, 1775, Lawrence’s first panel of the series, underscores a shared American fight for liberty and liberation. Massacre in Boston, the next panel, focuses on the death of Crispus Attucks, an American of African and Native descent, who was the first to die in the Boston Massacre, and therefore the first American killed in the cause of the Revolution.

In Lawrence’s telling, the American struggle has always been animated by a common fight for freedom from bondage, from chattel slavery (panel 5) to British impressment (panel 19). Lawrence never abandoned his art of black America. In “Struggle,” he integrates the black experience into the American experience and the other way around. As presented in a large blue exhibition hall at the Metropolitan, the panels form the portholes of a singular ship of state. “Hope has broadened the scene,” Lawrence said in 1957, comparing the series to his earlier work. “The statement is broader, even though it is the same statement.”

1 “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on August 29 and remains on view through November 1, 2020. The exhibition will travel to the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and The Phillips Collection. It was previously on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

A Classical Illness

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2020

A Classical Illness

On the pathology of recent protests.

Read the adaptation of “A Classical Illness” in The Wall Street Journal of August 17.

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, discusses the pathology of recent protests and the impending demise of Teddy Roosevelt’s statue at the American Museum of Natural History.

Pandemics are not always biological. Sometimes they are ideological. This summer certainly saw a plague of ruin descend over the cultural landscape. Even more alarming, there was little immune response against it among the institutions designed to stop its spread. Political viruses do have a way of evolving from seemingly inert strains into superbugs. Suddenly, they seize the brain, boil the muscles, and silence dissenting voices.

A cultural pathologist might conclude that anarchic strands have been sloshing around the fringes for decades. Their symptoms appeared in the World Trade Organization protests of 1999, in the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011, and on sundry other occasions. Undoubtedly, this sickness shares genetic makeup with the May protests of the Soixante-huitards, the radical affinities of the 1930s, and the many other anti-civilizational outbreaks in recent history. Ideologues have been tinkering with the infective code for a long time. Now in 2020, this virus develops a new mutation and latches onto the country’s sympathetic racial conscience.

Like most active viruses, we still do not fully understand it. A society in lockdown, a killing in a far-off state: the atmosphere was ripe for opportunistic infection. But an infection of what? In the pandemonium and the undermining of law and order, the summer riots could never have been about “black lives.” I doubt many know what they are spreading. I rather suspect they believe a new inquisitional disease, euphemistically called “cancel culture,” might be avoided if they first give the illness to others. They are wrong, of course; the revolution always eats its own as the choicest cuts of meat.

Still, there may be no other explanation for why figures and figureheads are being toppled in such violent manifestations. After all, online denunciations may require little, but it takes no small amount of energy to pull down a statue. In either case these are viral projections, a better you than me—and the yous are getting harder to find by the mes. That is why we keep seeing ever more fevered “canceling” and ever less regard for the “culture” these figures represent.

The spread of vandalism to just about every corner of the Western world might tell us something deeper about the pandemic we now face. This was never about Confederate monuments. That much is now clear. Statues of America’s Founding Fathers have been smashed and burned. More are on the chopping block. Christian iconography has been desecrated. Monuments to Gandhi and Churchill are under threat. Even memorials of the great emancipators and abolitionists—Lincoln, Grant, Matthias Baldwin, Hans Christian Heg, John Greenleaf Whittier, the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment—have been defaced. What should we make of the coroner’s inquest over this death of reverence?

These attacks at the hands of our own vingtards have paralleled the tearing down of words and opinions that have been accused of animus regardless of true meaning. For example, this summer, by executive order, the governor of Rhode Island removed “Providence Plantations” from the full name of the state on official documents. “We can’t ignore the image conjured by the word plantation,” the governor said, of a “phrase that’s so deeply associated with the ugliest time in our state and in our country’s history.” It matters little that the actual providential plantation Roger Williams founded in 1636 was one of the more progressive jurisdictions in the world and the first colony, on paper at least, to abolish slavery.

The Surrogates Court Building on Chambers Street, Manhattan. Photo: Todd Maisel.

It might be a fool’s errand to look for the patterns of the mob. Their targets are often arbitrary. Much of it is chaos for its own sake: glass to shatter, stores to loot, an attack on whatever is nailed down—an undermining of anything set in stone. In the sloshing, fluid dynamics of mob rule, the results are never static and never enough. Destruction leads to more destruction.

At the same time, while the figures have only become more disparate, the solid forms under assault have shown striking similarities. By and large, they are classical forms. In a way, their desecration is then an attack on the classical orders, and in particular the classical liberal order, they represent. This is not to suggest that today’s iconoclasts are dissident classicists. Nevertheless, the classical language of monuments and monumentality may remain more comprehensible to the attackers than the forgotten figures this language looks to honor. For the diseased spirit, classicism is a language calling out for cancelation.

Just look at the many recent images of vandalism. Classical plinths and pedestals have been covered in spray-paint. Classical order and law and order are conflated as the classical language of art and architecture is drowned out by anti-police slogans, epithets, and defilements. In downtown Manhattan, after they were allowed to settle into another encampment, vandals defaced the classical Municipal Building, the Tweed Courthouse, and the Surrogate Court Building—damage that Manhattan’s borough president said may now cost millions to clean. Meanwhile, New York’s radical mayor has cut the city’s anti-graffiti budget as he paints his own slogans across the avenues and appoints his wife, Chirlane McCray, to head his task force on racial redress.

As civilization from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment on to America’s founding has drawn on knowledge of the classical liberal world, the association of classical forms with an illegitimate order has long been a central tenet of anti-liberal ideology. Racism and whiteness have now been added to these accusations in an attempt to silence America’s classical language and to undermine the country’s classical inheritance. For example, “the primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition” is now considered one of the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness,” according to the Smithsonian’s own National Museum of African American History & Culture. In an astonishing display of racial bigotry, the museum adds the classical tradition to other “signs of whiteness” that include individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, rational linear thinking, decision-making, respect for authority, delayed gratification, punctuality, and being polite. Similarly, earlier this year, after the Trump administration proposed a classical mandate for the design of new Federal buildings in keeping with Washington’s classical vernacular, Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times associated the proposal with “authoritarian regimes of the past” and a style that “dredges up images of antebellum America.”

Architectural plan from the 2013 renovation of Roosevelt Hall, American Museum of Natural History, front view. Photo: Roche Dinkeloo.

There have always been diseased notions and crazed actors. What is new is the abdication of leadership and the collapse of institutional vitality that have permitted their fevered actions to spread. Those at the top of our institutions are the first to sacrifice their cultural charge in order to protect their salaries and status. Curators and writers, students and teachers, the art on the wall and the architecture around it—everyone else and everything else is up for grabs.

This sad fact recently came into sharp relief at a dénouement on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History. File this under “closing soon”: as of this writing, there may be little time remaining to see the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt. Located since 1940 in front of this New York institution, the statue serves as the focal point of the official state memorial to the naturalist, president, author, and statesman. In late June, museum leadership caved to protesters and requested that the city send the sculpture to pasture. Before politics runs roughshod over the Rough Rider, the work deserves another look in situ.

This sculpture by James Earle Fraser is based on Verrocchio’s grand equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, finished in 1495 and located in Venice’s Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Fraser’s work completes the classical arch designed by John Russell Pope that is both the museum’s entrance and another key part of the memorial program. The addition of the dignified American Indian and African guides that flank Roosevelt, now considered the most offending elements of the sculpture, were intended to symbolize the “continents of Africa and America, and if you choose may stand for Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races,” according to Fraser. Together the three figures lead a triumphal procession out of the arch, trailed this time not by the spoils of war but rather by the knowledge contained in the institution behind it. In his memorial proposal of 1928, Pope was right to consider the trio together as a “heroic group,” one that should be considered ahead of its time for including two non-Western people now guiding the equestrian figure. Without this sculpture at its center, the monument will be akin to the Lincoln Memorial without Daniel Chester French’s statue of Lincoln or the Jefferson Memorial (another Pope masterpiece) without Rudulph Evans’s statue of Jefferson.

Architectural plan from the 2013 renovation of Roosevelt Hall, American Museum of Natural History, side view. Photo: Roche Dinkeloo.

For years activists have targeted Pope’s grand classical monument to Roosevelt. In 2017 protestors stormed the museum’s Roosevelt Rotunda, designed by Pope as a hallowed Roman space on the other side of the arch. They denounced the memorial as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.” Vandals also defaced the statue’s granite pedestal with blood-red paint and labeled it a “monument to racial conquest.” Despite these episodes, in that year the city’s own commission tasked to investigate the statue’s history and iconography for racial offense chose not to recommend its removal. The commission even questioned the ethics, and legality, of altering this central part of Roosevelt’s official state memorial, which is closely tied to the history and forms of the entire museum.

These judgments ultimately meant little to Ellen Futter, the museum’s current president, and her trustees. Futter used the summer riots as an opportunity to rid herself of a problem at her doorstep while also handing an ideological victory to the mayor. “We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” Futter said in a joint statement. To which the mayor added that the “problematic” statue “explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.”

“Every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.” So George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” The attack on history from a “museum of history” shows how this radical disease now infects the hearts of our institutions. Sometimes a plague is so deadly it dies of its own lethality. Something similar may happen to our own wave of viral politics. At the American Museum of Natural History, the institution’s own Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda tells the story of our twenty-sixth president in quotations and three monumental murals painted by William Andrew Mackay in 1935. One canvas depicts Roosevelt’s support for the then-controversial but ultimately correct theory that the mosquito, and not poor sanitation, was the cause of Yellow Fever in Panama.

Perhaps one day we will better identify and isolate the vectors of our own ideological pandemic. Until then, a quote by Roosevelt, also displayed in his Rotunda, might at least inspire some renewed resistance: “Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”

New Podcast: Eric Gibson on the Necessity of Sculpture

In a new podcast from The New Criterion, Eric Gibson and James Panero discuss sculpture in exile and culture under siege. Eric Gibson's book "The Necessity of Sculpture: Selected Essays and Criticism, 1985–2019" can be found at https://newcriterion.com/bookstore?mode=criterion. Cover photo: the recently defaced Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts, depicting Shaw and the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, an African-American regiment during the Civil War.

Eric Gibson, the Arts in Review editor of The Wall Street Journal, joins me to discuss sculpture in exile and culture under siege.