A Different American Scene

New York’s Whitney Museum has brought its 1974 season to a close with a surprise hit: a full-length retrospective of the work of Jacob Lawrence. Mr. Lawrence, 56 years old and black, is by no means a newcomer to the art scene; ever since his first one-man show in 1938, which presented a series of pictures telling the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, liberator of Haiti from France, he has had a highly successful career. Yet because he has resolutely followed his own star and refused to cater to the whims of fashion, either artistic or political, he has not until now received the serious attention his achievement merits.

Lawrence’s early manhood coincided with the Depression, when the so-called “American Scene” painters were adorning post offices and courthouses with murals of muscular unemployed workers and starving sharecroppers paid for by the WPA. Customarily, art critics have associated him with this group because he, like so many, was on the WPA payroll for a time and because, as a black, his subject matter was derived largely from the black experience in America. But as this exhibition makes clear, Lawrence was not really close to the American Scene artists.

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Ruth Berenson

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New York’s Whitney Museum has brought its 1974 season to a close with a surprise hit: a full-length retrospective of the work of Jacob Lawrence. Mr. Lawrence, 56 years old and black, is by no means a newcomer to the art scene; ever since his first one-man show in 1938, which presented a series of pictures telling the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, liberator of Haiti from France, he has had a highly successful career. Yet because he has resolutely followed his own star and refused to cater to the whims of fashion, either artistic or political, he has not until now received the serious attention his achievement merits.

Lawrence’s early manhood coincided with the Depression, when the so-called “American Scene” painters were adorning post offices and courthouses with murals of muscular unemployed workers and starving sharecroppers paid for by the WPA. Customarily, art critics have associated him with this group because he, like so many, was on the WPA payroll for a time and because, as a black, his subject matter was derived largely from the black experience in America. But as this exhibition makes clear, Lawrence was not really close to the American Scene artists.