Flower Woman

Jacob Lawrence records in the present work a crowd of figures dressed to the nines as they process into a party, as confirmed by the painter in conversation with the late owner. With the title Flower Woman, however, Lawrence seemingly dedicates the painting to the hardworking woman at lower right, actively calling out to sell her floral corsages. Indeed, Lawrence purposefully captured all variants of city living in his art, portraying both the joys and struggles of everyday life and confirming for Harlem residents of the mid-20th Century that they were not invisible in the world. His teacher, the artist Charles Alston, praised, “He is particularly sensitive to the life about him; the joy, the suffering, the weakness, the strength of the people he sees every day…Lawrence symbolizes more than any one I know, the vitality, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially conscious generation of [Black] artists.” (as quoted in M.W. Brown, Jacob Lawrence, New York, 1974, p. 9)

The first African-American artist to gain widespread fame, Lawrence burst into national recognition in November 1941 at age 24 when Fortune magazine published his groundbreaking Migration series, which explored the mass movement of Blacks from Southern states to the North after World War I. The series was quickly purchased by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Lawrence returned to Harlem a success and began painting street scenes and interior views of his New York neighborhood, such as the present work.

In the paintings from this important 1940s period, Lawrence continued to explore the underlying themes of community—and purposeful movement together as a community—which he had established in the Migration pictures. For example, in 1948, the same year as he painted Flower Woman, Lawrence captured scenes ranging from men observing a board game (Kibitzers, Addison Gallery of Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts) and boys racing a soapbox car (Summer Street Scene, University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, New York) to a medical emergency (Ambulance Call, Promised Gift to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas) and The Wedding (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois). Yet, as in the present work, there is purpose present even in the more frivolous of Lawrence’s subjects. Patricia Hills explains, “The men in Lawrence’s pictures are not merely playing games, kibitzing, loitering or walking from here to there like the disinterested flaneurs of Baudelaire. Instead, they are participating in a democratic ritual of community—where whatever they do will command respect, whatever they say will be considered. On the streets and sidewalks they consolidate friendships.” (Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence, Berkeley, California, 2009, p. 202)

In the catalogue for the recent Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Claire Tancons connects these rituals of purposeful community movement back to the Great Migration, and the success of their depiction in art back to Lawrence’s Migration series. In the early- to mid-20th Century, Harlem saw a proliferation of parades for fraternal organizations as well as religious and memorial events, a history which informs the demonstration culture of the 21st Century. Tancons explains, “Processional movement is the embodied landscape of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Great Migration was the foundation to all the processions that would follow in Harlem, where Jacob Lawrence’s famous painted cycle gave it representational valence…It is through the formal openness of The Migration Series that the artist established a distinct pictorial, and distinctly representational, template for the processional as a topos.” (The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, New York, 2024, p. 129) In its depiction of a group costumed and moving together for one such organized community event, Flower Woman follows in this cultural and artistic precedent. By depicting the figures in gowns and tuxedos, Lawrence signals the celebratory nature of the event; “tuxedos, and even black tailcoats with white tie, are never work at funerals’ rather they are more often the uniform of celebrations, of stepping out.” (M.L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, Durham, North Carolina, p. 230)

The sense of community organization in Flower Woman is underscored through Lawrence’s formal considerations. As in many of his works from the late 1940s, here the artist groups and overlaps his figures to create the sense of one powerful mass of humanity. The individual forms are imposing, with hunched shoulders and massive, long black coats, and together they form a sum greater than their parts. As Lawrence himself described of The Wedding of the same year, “The pageantry is suggested through emphasizing and enriching the color.” (The Downtown Gallery files, Archives of American Art) Here, he keeps his palette limited to just a few hues of pure black, brown, red, yellow and green. At the same time, his brushwork creates a variety of patterns within each block of color. The juxtaposition of these different visual syncopations creates a jazz-like play of rhythm across the overall scene. Leslie King-Hammond explains, “The sounds and music of the jazz age were not lost on Lawrence as he incorporated the aural elements of rhythms, breaks, and changes into the visual polyphony of Harlem’s environment, people, and culture.” (Jacob Lawrence: Over the Line, Washington, D.C., 2001, p. 79)

The strikingly modern execution of Flower Woman not only reflects these cultural influences, but also Lawrence’s interactions within the art world. While maintaining representative subjects, Lawrence was well immersed in the abstract movements of the post-War period in which he painted. In 1946, two years before painting Flower Woman, he taught at Black Mountain College alongside Joseph Albers, who helped Lawrence understand more technically the ways colors convey meanings and the effects of overlaying organic forms with geometric shapes. Yet, while many of Lawrence’s Black contemporaries like Norman Lewis sought to escape relegation as solely ‘Black art’ by shifting to fully abstract painting, Lawrence instead utilized modern techniques to further highlight the figurative aspects of his work. For example, following his time with Albers, Lawrence updated his technique of outlining facial features to instead leave negative space for these details. “As conservator Elizabeth Steele explains…‘He painstakingly brushed the brown paint up to and just over the edges of the underdrawing, leaving a thin line in reserve to depict the eyes and other fine details…He then painted a transparent yellow over the reserved space.’ The result is a richer sense of patterning and a more sophisticated handling of the features of dark faces.” (Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence, pp. 193-94)

Leslie King-Hammond summarizes, “Through his innovative figurative abstractions that mirrored the vast reservoir of culture and history of the jazz-depression-migration-era culture as it was expressed in Harlem, Lawrence gave visual affirmation and reality to a thoroughly authentic modernist style. That it can be directly attributed to the dynamics of an African American aesthetic moves Lawrence and all of black America from outside the edge to inside the center of modernist ideals.” (Jacob Lawrence: Over the Line, p. 84) Focusing on content important to his community while experimenting with his own abstracted form of figurative modernism, Lawrence’s original depictions of the African-American experience have come to be appreciated as defining achievements of not only the Harlem Renaissance but moreover in the history of American art.