MOVING DAYS
MoMA has mounted a show about the great African American migration to the north called One Way Ticket. It takes painter Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series from 1941 as its centerpiece. This group of 64 small (about 12″ x 18″) oil paintings documents that movement in intimate vignettes with prose captions on wall texts below. The language is simple, which makes the facts all the more devastating. We read, “The trains were packed continually with migrants… Many of them left because of Southern conditions… They were very poor… Another cause was lynching… There had always been discrimination.”
Each small panel is smartly and economically composed, with strong graphic shapes rendered in flat, acrid hues. The sparse, controlled brushwork allows the white of the wood panel beneath to show through, giving the paintings a rough, unprecious feeling. But these paintings are not about painting. And they are not really about history either. They are about people, about the thousands of black Americans who left the rural south for the urban north between the wars, without money and work, searching for better lives.
Though simply rendered, the figures are never cartoonish. They’re ennobled by their actions, and move in formal, expressive ways. These are paintings that have the character of dance. Four men lifting bushels of cotton, seen in profile, have the solemnity and rhythmic clarity of figures on a Egyptian frieze. A boy peering over a table to watch his mother slice bread from a loaf looks like a symbol of need. Three men in handcuffs waiting deportation stand stiff with pride, like giants. We rarely see people from the front, or see their faces. Instead we see them from the side, from the back, or obscured by a newspaper, a fence, a hat, or a tree. They don’t offer themselves, or their sorrows, up for consideration. Instead they move on.