The Art Institute of Chicago

The WeddingAuthor(s): Jacob LawrenceSource: Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, Notable Quotations at TheArt Institute of Chicago (2003), pp. 76-77Published by: The Art Institute of ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121066 .

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The Wedding

1948

Jacob Lawrence

(American; 1917-200 i)

Tempera on board; 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)

GIFT OF MARY P. HINES, IN MEMORY OF HER MOTHER

FRANCES W. PICK, 1993.258

orn in Atlantic City, Jacob Lawrence moved to New York in 1930, where at age fifteen he enrolled in the

Harlem Art Workshop at the I35th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Given instruction by luminar- ies of the Harlem Renaissance such as Augusta Savage and Charles Alston, Lawrence soon created a bold,

unique style that he applied to seldom-treated subjects drawn from black history and life in Harlem. His three

early series on Frederick Douglass, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and Harriet Tubman (completed between 1937 and 1940) attracted the attention of cultural leaders of the Harlem Renaissance as well as figures from New York's modern- art establishment. Likewise, the "Migration" series (194O-4I), his masterpiece chronicling the historic exodus of south- ern blacks to the industrial cities of the North, was shown at New York's prestigious Downtown Gallery and then

jointly purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New

York, and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Lawrence's works are informed by a rich diversity of

sources. Their narrative clarity, for instance, is indebted to both comic strips and early Renaissance frescoes and

panel paintings, while their graphic economy owes much to the example of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya and

the Mexican painter and muralist Jose Clemente Orozco. In his nimble handling of abstract form, Lawrence also shows a mastery of the Synthetic Cubist style of Pablo Picasso-a classic modernist legacy shared by many of Lawrence's colleagues at the Downtown Gallery, includ-

ing Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, and Charles Sheeler. Executed in vibrant tempera colors on a white

ground, The Wedding exemplifies Lawrence's expressive, trademark style. Emphasizing the solemnity of the event, the artist arranged his composition with symmetrical rigor: a stern-faced minister addresses bride and groom, while two witnesses stand in profile nearby. The contours of the figures and flower stands are rendered in a series of

rhyming convex and concave lines, creating a sense of

constrained, nervous energy that finds release in the riotous profusion of intensely colored flowers and stained

glass. The strange tension between the somber and the

joyous exhibited in The Wedding is a quality that is

unique to Lawrence. The painting's clashing emotional tenor conveys a slightly melancholy, realist poetic of res- olution withheld.

DANIEL SCHULMAN

76

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