Artist Jacob Lawrence's passionate, bold work

This panel is entitled "The Life of Harriet TubmanNo. 4." The caption reads: On a hot summer day about 1820, a group of slave children were tumbling in the sandy soil in the state of Maryland--and among them was one, Harriet Tubman.

By Helyn Trickey
CNN

(CNN) -- Artist Jacob Lawrence painted mostly with primary colors; blood reds, bright, shiny blues and blinding yellows. The colors were bold and dynamic and, best of all, cheap.

"The primary colors were like 15 cents a jar at the five and dime," Lawrence said in an interview several years ago. "I was dealing with very inexpensive material, and it suited me."

The subject of his paintings suited him as well. The Harlem, New York, street vendors and busy single mothers, the policeman and protesting crowds, the window washers and children playing in gray streets all populated his art in buoyant color.

RESOURCES Take a virtual tour of Lawrence's art at the artist's official archive  • The Phillips Collection: Jacob Lawrence traveling exhibition

His work also embraced everyday life in the bustling section of the city. His 1937 painting titled "Free Clinic" depicts an overcrowded medical facility. Mothers tending sick babies sit alongside men balancing themselves on crutches. A nurse walks among the crowd as a dour policeman stands by a wall.

The young Lawrence, influenced by the burgeoning and brutal existence of the poor, newly immigrated African-American community, was growing a social conscience that would manifest itself in his art for years.

"He's looking at and valuing all of the population of Harlem," said Senior Curator at the Phillips Collection museum in Washington D.C., Beth Turner. "He is saying, 'Look! Here is a new culture and we have planted ourselves here.'"

Art as 'empowerment'

Lawrence was born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but by the age of 13 he was living with his mother and siblings in Harlem. As a teen-ager he was active in community art programs. It was this unique, progressive education that would help cement his simple, clear style.

Lawrence painted "The Visitors" in 1959

"Lawrence was given a much more open and wide-ranging and radical approach to art education," said Turner.

"The (Harlem) workshops were set up to teach art education as a means of empowerment," she said. While the young artist was taught immutable laws of composition, he was also empowered by his instructors to make his art individualistic, Turner said.

Lawrence worked with a reduced palette of colors and organized his patterns with clarity and simplicity, said Turner.

By 1934, the young artist was studying with Charles Alston and Henry Bannarn at the Harlem Art Workshop on 141st street. Lawrence was forced to drop out of high school and find odd jobs when his mother lost her job, but that setback did not slow the young man's thirst for art knowledge. By 1935 he was painting very personal scenes of family life, his studio and police brutality on the streets of Harlem.

In 1939 Lawrence completed 32 painted panels entitled "The Life of Frederick Douglass." The panels detail Douglass's escape from slavery and rise as a leader in the abolitionist movement.

The migration north

By the spring of 1941 Lawrence was hard at work on a series of 60 panels entitled "The Migration of the Negro." This series, documenting the flight of African-Americans following the Civil War from the rural South to northern cities like Chicago and New York, would prove to be one of Lawrence's best works, and it was well-received by the national art community. The entire series was exhibited in 1942 at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C., and in 1944 the panels were sent on a national tour.

"The Migration of the NegroNo. 11" The caption reads: In many places, because of the war, food had doubled in price.

"What makes him (Lawrence) so modern is his ability to use positive and negative space, to think about what is there and what is not there," Turner said.

"In the 1940's Harlem was the main street of African-American culture. You can almost see Lawrence's passion to make this visible and to celebrate it with everything he's got," she added.

Lawrence not only painted in a series of panels, but he also added captions to his art. Sometimes Lawrence or his wife Gwendolyn Knight wrote these small blurbs, but often the words came from writers he admired like poet Claude Mckay.

"I think it (the captions) had to do with his desire to communicate, not to mince words in creating this kind of narrative," Turner said.

A somber panel number 18 from "The Migration of the Negro" series shows crowds of African-Americans streaming across the canvas from several directions. The traveler's heads are down, their bodies tilted forward in determination. The caption reads: "The migration gained in momentum."

In 1947 Lawrence traveled to Georgia to document the plight of the sharecroppers. His panel entitled "Red Earth -- Georgia" overwhelms as at least 2/3 of the canvas is painted a thick, dark red. The top 1/3 is black with farmers hunkered down.

"The sharecroppers are squeezed by the red, red Earth," Turner said. "You see irony in his paintings. He is very deliberate and straight forward."

Lawrence produced art from 1933 to 2000, and he was one of the first African-American artists to be embraced by the mainstream American art world. Even as he was dying from lung cancer in June of 2000, Turner remembers a man of incredible grace.

"He went off morphine ... and he was so thin." Turner recalled. "But once he started to draw he didn't want to stop. His hands were ageless, and the control and focus of his lines was wonderful," Turner said.

Lawrence's legacy is a body of work breathtaking in scope.

"He often said the American people are so passionate, the art should be passionate. He gave us the American passion," Turner said.