Deconstructing Lawrence’s Struggle Series: Panel 3

This spring, former Phillips curator Beth Turner taught an undergraduate practicum at the University of Virginia focusing on Jacob Lawrence’s Struggle series. In this multi-part blog series, responses from Turner’s students in reference to individual works from the series will be posted each week.

Struggle_Panel 3

Jacob Lawrence, Struggle … From the History of the American People, no. 13: Rally Mohawks! Bring out your axes, and tell King George we’ll pay no taxes on his foreign tea…—A Song of 1773, 1955. Egg tempera on hardboard, 16 x 12 in. Private Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Rally Mohawks! Bring out your axes, and tell King George we’ll pay no taxes on his foreign tea…  – A song of 1773

The Boston Tea Party is depicted in this panel with an abstracted and geometric composition. The eye follows the dynamic image and quickly absorbs a violent scene, but one lacking in anger or sentimentality. Rather, it is assertive and cogent in communicating the chaos. The colonists are shown under the guise of American Indians, which was not an arbitrary choice; for the colonists, the Indian symbolized liberty and an emerging American identity.

The issue of identity is contextually relevant to the period in which Lawrence was painting this panel. The 20th century was a time when African American identity was being formed and interrogated. Prominent African Americans, especially artists, were charged with constructing and elevating this identity and self. Jacob Lawrence agreed that this “twoness” as an American and a black man or woman existed, but that it was symbolic. Perhaps these challenging juxtapositions are also what defined the colonists and their need to appropriate the identity of the American Indian, two seemingly polar identities.

Alexis Baker

 

This panel depicts six figures in conflict: three masked figures, two unmasked figures, and an additional arm which leads to an “off screen” figure which is likely unmasked (the hand is grasping a masked face).  Each masked figure grasps the face or head of an unmasked figure and vice versa.  The masked figures wear colored garments and Indian headdresses, and the unmasked figures wear black.  Two of the masked figures hold hammers in aggressive poses.  Composition is triangular, every line is diagonal which lends a sense of movement and tension to the image.

As there is no evidence of a physical altercation during the Boston Tea Party, Lawrence may have intended this image to depict the ideological conflict between revolutionary Americans and loyalist Americans.

Heather Chandler

Deconstructing Lawrence’s Struggle Series: Panel 2

This spring, former Phillips curator Beth Turner taught an undergraduate practicum at the University of Virginia focusing on Jacob Lawrence’s Struggle series. In this multi-part blog series, responses from Turner’s students in reference to individual works from the series will be posted each week. Read the introductory post here.

Struggle_Panel 2

Jacob Lawrence, Struggle … From the History of the American People, no. 2: Massacre in Boston, 1955. Egg tempera on hardboard, 16 x 12 in. Private Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

On March 5, 1770, an argument broke out between a colonist and two British guards outside of the Custom House in Boston. It escalated to a riot between Bostonians and the British guards, resulting in the deaths of five colonists. This incident was almost immediately immortalized in Paul Revere’s famous engraving The Bloody Massacre, which aimed to cement the brewing anti-British sentiment among the colonists with its inclusions of controversial and falsified details. In stark contrast to Revere’s propagandist agenda, Jacob Lawrence’s interpretation Massacre in Boston focuses on the struggles of the American colonists by portraying them rallying around their wounded compatriot. There was not a single British soldier in the painting.

Fast forward to 1955 when Lawrence worked on this panel, the year that African Americans rallied around the death of Emmett Till, a young African American boy murdered by two white men in Mississippi. The culprits were not convicted of homicide. Through the media attention the case garnered, it was transformed into the symbol of the disparities of justice and rights for African Americans. In both of these episodes in American history, the power of the people is emphasized. This aspect is conveyed in Lawrence’s work with his focus on groups of figures coming together, fighting for a common cause.

Phuong Nguyen