Rendering on Painting №3

The article published on the website news-gazette.com on February 3, 2013 3is headlined “Art Beat: Check out Lawrence paintings at Krannert Art Museum”. The article discusses one of the most significant American artists of the 20th century, Jacob Lawrence, who was an extraordinary storyteller with his paintbrush. It was revealed that Lawrence used a limited range of pure colors to define his forms and to achieve a consistency and rhythm among the paintings. They tell L'Ouverture's story with gravity, clarity, emotional force and beauty.

Speaking of the situation it is necessary to note that Lawrence created the series when he was 20 to pay tribute to the hero of the Haitian revolution who in the late 18th century defeated Napoleon and drove him from Haiti. Lawrence departed from that in the size of his paintings — 111/2 by 19 inches — but not in their scope and ambition. He reduced the project to one that could be arranged on the floor of his artist's studio. 

It’s an open secret that Gaither places the L'Ouverture Series squarely in the genre of history paintings, which typically are grand in concept, distinctive in points of view and intended for public consumption. There is a general feeling to believe that in his series, Lawrence, himself a product of the Harlem Renaissance, depicted the Haitian leader from birth to death. In one painting, L'Ouverture as a child sees an enraged planter striking a slave. Another shows him as a boy, fleeing into the tropical forest.

The article concludes by saying that the saddest depicts a despondent L'Ouverture lying on a bench against a wall in a castle in France, where he was deported in 1802 after being forced to resign as governor of Haiti by forces sent by Napoleon to restore French authority in the former colony. The hero of Haiti died in 1803 in France.

As for me, I think that the brilliance of Lawrence's original concept remains underappreciated. Moreover, Lawrence's narrative sense gave the world art from which understanding of human possibility can grow.