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Title: Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938-40 by Ellen Harkins Wheat ISBN: 0-9616982-5-X Publisher: Hampton Univ Pub. Date: June, 1991 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $40.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Breathtaking
Comment: Parents hoping to introduce their children to modern American art could do worse than to buy this edition reproducing two series of paintings by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), one of the finest African American artists in U.S. history.

Published in 1991 by the Hampton University Museum in Virginia, this book contains four essays and reproductions of two Lawrence series, all 32 Frederick Douglass paintings made in 1938 and 1939 and all 31 Harriet Tubman paintings made in 1939 and 1940. Lawrence painted both series and wrote the captions to tell the stories of hope and emancipation of African Americans.

The first three essays, each running 10 to 12 pages, relate how Lawrence developed his series format and, specifically, how he developed the ideas and art in each of these two stories. He was influenced by a belief that African Americans, while not still enslaved, were in 1940 still in "an economic slavery." The stories he featured, while historical, remained relevant to his own period as well. The fourth covers the imagery of struggle.

Bold and unforgiving, Lawrence's vibrant works grew from his own childhood migration--from Atlantic City, New Jersey to Easton, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia and finally, at 13, to Harlem, from his exposure to African-American culture--and his intensive training in the Utopia Children's House and New Deal-sponsored Harlem Art Workshop of the 1930s. In Harlem, he studied old masters like Giotto and Pieter Breughel the Elder and modern masters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse.

At that time, the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was still funding public art murals, but Lawrence was too young to gain a commission. Instead, he determined to show the African-American struggle for freedom in real-life stories, tying past to present. From 1938 to 1941, he used the New York public library for research, creating in swift succession five series of paintings telling the stories of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Douglass, Tubman, John Brown, and The Migration of the Negro.

In the middle two series, Lawrence hoped to speak artistically of the legendary escapes from slavery made by two African-American heroes, each of whom led the struggle for ultimate freedom for all. The paintings depicted beatings, coercion, repression and ultimately courageous escapes. The faces and bodies in these works speak of the brutality of slavery and the exhilaration that came from its escape. Lawrence wove bold colors and themes throughout the series, thereby joining each set of paintings into a whole.

He succeeded, too, because these works are as beautiful and wild as anything ever created by van Gogh, and a great deal more hopeful.

Even if you don't want to know all the personal and American history that Lawrence melded in the creation of these works--which I can't imagine--you will relish owning a book containing color plates of two entire series, complete with Lawrence's enthralling captions.

This book is a gem. Alyssa A. Lappen

Rating: 2
Summary: Gina's Review of this book
Comment: My review of this book is somewhat good and somewhat bad, thus I have some good news and some bad. I shall now explain to you the good things about this book. Some of thy good things about this book is that if your deciding to do Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman this is a good book for a project but the bad things about the book. Is that say for example you are just doing Harriet Tubman or your just doing Frederick Douglass, it would be difficult to just find information about one, because you could think thier talking about about Harriet you could get the wrong information, and research the wrong information. That is why i would not buy this book, for myself or for anyone that I now. PS: I lllooooovvvvveeeeeeee BILLY