Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Story
Sixty small panels, painted in flat blocks of colour, tell the story of millions of Black Americans leaving the rural South for the cities of the North. Jacob Lawrence made them when he was just twenty three, and they remain one of the great works of American art.
He was an American painter who told Black history in strong, simple shapes, best known for The Migration Series and for a style he called dynamic cubism.
The story in sixty panels
The Migration Series, painted in 1941, follows the Great Migration in sixty numbered panels, each with a short caption, like a painted book.
It reads as history painting of a kind rarely seen, the epic of ordinary people told in flat, plain shapes rather than grand classical scenes.
How he painted it
Lawrence worked in water based paint, a casein tempera, in bright, limited colours. To keep the sixty panels consistent he laid them all out at once and painted them colour by colour, all the browns, then all the blues, across every panel.
That assembly line method, close in spirit to tempera painting, gave the whole series a single, unified feel.
The Harlem school
Lawrence grew up in Harlem during its great cultural flowering and trained in its community workshops, surrounded by writers, musicians and older artists.
He absorbed both the energy of the neighbourhood and the lessons of modern art, fusing them into something plain spoken and his own.
A divided masterpiece
The Migration Series was bought jointly by two museums, which split the panels between them: the even numbered panels went to one, the odd numbered to another.
So the single story now lives in two cities, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Phillips Collection in Washington, and is reunited only for special exhibitions.
Things people ask about Jacob Lawrence
What is he known for?
The Migration Series and his flat, narrative paintings of Black history.
How old was he when he painted it?
Twenty three, in 1941.
Why is the series split?
Two museums bought it together and divided the panels.
When did he die?
In 2000.
Why the simple shapes carry so much
Lawrence proved that the biggest stories do not need grand effects. With flat colour and a few clear shapes he carried the weight of a whole people on the move, and the gamble of painting sixty panels at once produced a work that still feels like a single breath.
He became the first Black artist taken on by a major New York gallery, and later spent decades teaching, shaping younger painters as much through the classroom as the canvas. Late in life he turned to the theme of the builder, painting carpenters and tools as a symbol of making and repair, a quieter coda to the great journey he had drawn at twenty three. The Migration Series toured the country soon after it was made, an unusual honour for so young an artist, and it helped bring the story of the Great Migration to a national audience for the first time in paint. Lawrence went on to chronicle other chapters of Black history in the same plain, forceful style, building a body of work that reads almost like an illustrated national memory. His wife Gwendolyn Knight was also a painter, and the two shared a long creative life, working side by side and supporting each other across more than half a century.