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Jacob Lawrence, Street to Mbari

Three people with dark brown skin lie on a marigold-orange ground that extends toward a high horizon line in this stylized, vertical painting. An ant and two other bugs cling to a screen of tall, moss-green, flame-shaped leaves that span the width of the composition and separate us from the people. Beyond the leaves, the large soles and rounded toes of the woman’s feet are almost half the height of the painting. She holds a rifle against her body, which is enclosed in a mostly round, periwinkle-blue shape with narrow strips of cranberry-red around the top, left, and bottom. Her head is tilted sharply to our left, her ear near her shoulder so her face points upward in profile. Her nose and mouth are created with thin strokes of golden yellow. Her closed eyes are marked with slivers of white, and a raspberry-pink scarf covers her hair. A slender green stem with pointed leaves rises at an angle next to her head. Beyond her, a man lies with his body curled, so his body curves toward us with his head to our right. He wears only black, shin-length pants. His bald head rests on crossed arms, and his ankles are also crossed. His closed eyes are painted with white and his features outlined in gold, like the woman. Just behind him, a woman curls around an object held in one large hand. Fields of pink and blue, in the same shades as the other woman, read as a blue cap and skirt, and a pink wrap or blanket. A round, brown shape within an off-white field appears to be a baby cradled close to her head. One tall, blade-like leaf grows up behind her shoulders. The orange ground comes to a point to our left of center and dips down to our right. The area beneath the straight horizon line is filled in with midnight blue, nearly black. Above, a sapphire-blue band fills the top quarter of the composition. The artist signed and dated the lower right, “Jacob Lawrence 67.”

Made with mostly square or rectangular pieces of patterned paper in shades of asparagus and moss green, sky blue, tan, and ash brown, a man with brown skin sits in the center of this horizontal composition with a second person over his shoulder, in the upper left corner of this collage. The man’s facial features are a composite of cut-outs, mostly in shades of brown and gray, as if from black-and white photographs, and he smokes a cigarette. He sits with his body angled slightly to our right and he looks off in that direction, elbows resting on thighs and wrists crossed. His button-down shirt and pants, similarly collaged, are mottled with sky blue and white. One foot, on our right, is created with a cartoonish, shoe-shaped, black silhouette. The paper used for the other foot seems to have been scraped and scratched, creating the impression that that foot is bare. A tub, made of the same blue and white paper of the man’s suit, sits on the ground to our left, in the lower corner. The man sits in front of an expanse made up of green and brown pieces of paper patterned with wood grain, which could be a cabin. In a window in the upper left, a woman’s face, her features similarly collaged, looks out at us. One dark hand, large in relation to the people, rests on the sill with the fingers extended down the side of the house. The right third of the composition is filled collaged scraps of paper patterned to resemble leafy trees. Closer inspection reveals the form of a woman, smaller in scale than the other two, standing in that zone, facing our left in profile near a gray picket fence. She has a brown face, her hair wrapped in a patterned covering, and she holds a watermelon-sized, yellow fruit with brown stripes. Several blue birds and a red-winged blackbird fly and stand nearby. Above the woman and near the top of the composition, a train puffs along the top of what we read as the tops of trees. The artist signed the work in black letters in the upper right corner: “romare bearden.”

Donald Ray Stinson

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