‘Everything Was a Muse to Him’: A Jacob Lawrence Expert on a 1944 ARTnews Profile of the Artist
about 53 months ago (01/24/2020)
A Jacob Lawrence Expert on a Profile of Him from ARTnews’s Archives – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All January 24, 2020 1:35pm George Chinsee Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was one of the deftest documentarians of African-American life in the United States, and over the next few years, people across the country will get a chance to see one of his greatest series of paintings, “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954–56), united in full for the first time. With the series’ nationwide tour kicking off at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, earlier this month, ARTnews pulled from deep in our archives a 1944 profile of Lawrence by Aline B. Louchheim. Leslie King-Hammond , founding director of the Center of Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art and an expert on Lawrence, was enlisted for a contemporary insight on a piece that, today, reads as dated.