American Journey

Jacob Lawrence was only 24 years old when Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery, on East 51st Street, exhibited his "Migration Series" in 1941. The series was first shown by itself for one week in November to coincide with the reproduction of several of its paintings in a spread in Fortune magazine, which had been seeking a way to dramatize the plight of African-Americans' northward migration in the interwar years. Various forces — not least an invasion by crop-devastating boll weevils, depicted in one of Lawrence's memorable images — had been destroying the agrarian life Southern blacks had clung to ever since emancipation. In December of that year, Lawrence's paintings of the "Great Migration" again appeared in Halpert's gallery, as part of a groundbreaking exhibition, assembled by Halpert with the writer Alain Locke, surveying the achievements of African-American artists.

Lawrence's series comprised 60 tempera-on-board paintings, but, as recounted in fabulous detail by Lindsay Pollock in her biography of Edith Halpert, "The Girl with the Gallery" (Public Affairs Press), no single person or institution was prepared at that time to purchase the entire series. Though both Lawrence and Halpert wished to keep the series together, Halpert eventually got the Museum of Modern Art to buy 30 of the paintings (the even-numbered ones), and the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., to buy the 30 odd-numbered works.

Now, 17 of the 30 pictures owned by the but also the writers Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. A high-school dropout, Lawrence received artistic training in settlement houses and at the Harlem Art Workshop, located in the West 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Harlem's cultural efflorescence is typically viewed as a 1920s phenomenon stamped out by the Great Depression, but many of Harlem's, or Harlemites', greatest cultural accomplishments came later: Zora Neale Hurston's novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" came out in 1937; Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington didn't team up until 1939, and their song "Take the 'A' Train" wasn't recorded until 1941, and Jacob Lawrence's "Migration of the Negro" (as the series was originally titled) came in 1940 and 1941.

The "Migration Series" could not have come earlier. The migration story it tells is that of the whole of the interwar years, not just of the 1920s, when, in spite of poverty and discrimination, black Harlemites — as Lawrence recounts in painting number 31, on view at the Whitney — enjoyed the housing made available to them by the speculative overbuilding and consequent housing glut in upper Manhattan. As the migration continued through the Great Depression, however, Harlem grew overcrowded — as shown in number 47 — and the hopes of the 1920s foundered on the shoals of unemployment and disinvestment.

Lawrence's technique diverged both from the Art Deco stylizations of the 1920s — think not only of Aaron Douglas's paintings but also of Josephine Baker's performances — that had become almost as much of an African-American cliché as the minstrelsy-derived clichés the 1920s forms displaced, and from the social realism of politically engaged painting of the 1930s. Lawrence used a spare, Modernist-inspired idiom to tell his story quietly and truthfully, with no sentimentality, no slickness and, most remarkably, no political posturing. He used flat forms, bold (but seldom bright) colors, and schematic figures in ways that indicate a debt to Matisse above all. If something of African tribal art appears in these paintings, remember that Lawrence disavowed its direct influence — meaning that he'd brought African-American art full circle, drawing inspiration from European artists who, as Locke had pointed out, had been influenced by African art. Lawrence also claimed that his use of color owed less to Modernist painters than to the way many Harlemites decorated their homes, in bold planes of rusts and lavenders.

My favorite picture in the Whitney show is number 1, a beautifully composed crowd scene in a Southern railroad station. The whole lower three-quarters of the frame consists of massed bodies — hurtling to gates marked "Chicago," "New York," and "St. Louis" — with their schematized brown faces backgrounded by black, green, yellow, and rust-colored coats. It was the first picture in the series and probably one of the hardest to paint. Another favorite is number 31, in which we see three apartment buildings — gray-white, brown, burgundy — with a Mondrian-like arrangement of windows in yellow, blue, silver-blue, and rust. The caption reads, "The migrants found improved housing when they arrived in the north." Number 49 shows blacks at dining tables in the right half of the frame, and whites at dining tables to the left, the two halves separated by a zigzagging yellow cordon. "They found discrimination in the North. It was a different kind," the caption reads.

The knock on Lawrence is that he was more illustrator than artist. But he was, above all, a storyteller, one of the great ones of the 20th century.

Until January 6 (Madison Avenue at 75th Street, 1-800-WHITNEY).