Post War and Contemporary Art

Provenance:

DC Moore Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1996

Exhibited:

New York, New York, DC Moore Gallery, Jacob Lawrence Paintings, Drawings and Prints from 1937-1998, December 12, 2001-January 26, 2002

Best recognized for his masterfully flat stylized modernist depictions of the African American experience, Jacob Lawrence (American, 1917-2000) is universally celebrated as one of the most important African American artists and expressive cultural voices of the 20th century. Lawrence came of age in New York’s Harlem of the Great Depression, where, as a beneficiary of the artistic renaissance in the decade prior, he cut his artistic teeth in the WPA Easel Division and Harlem Art Workshop and developed his unique socially conscious narrative painting approach. Working in his favored tempera paint or kindred gouache, Lawrence took inspiration from the limitation of the fast-drying, opaque media to employ what he referred to as “dynamic cubism”: arranging bold flat passages of color in collage-like fashion, dramatically layering the shapes and characters to intentionally distort and foreshorten the perspective on the stage of the picture plane. In his highly heralded paintings, Lawrence remarkably visually simplifies various existential complexities to the essential, arrestingly and impactfully documenting the breadth of the accomplishments and the struggles of black people in America. 

Painted in 1953, a significant decade in the artist’s oeuvre, the presently offered gouache Time demonstrates an established and mature artist operating at his peak painterly prowess. The work is composed of an arrangement that first appears static and nonobjective, of unmodulated and sophistically colored shapes, but as eyes adjust the dynamism of the scene slowly vibrates: a solitary figure hunched over a desk or table—

perhaps at work, possibly sleeping, maybe in despair—with a partial realized alarm clock adjacently ticking. As if out of the subject’s imagination or dream, stark, stylized branches punctuated by colorful leaves and blossoms surround in a cyclical network of naturalistic geometry, both symbolic of seasonal progression and art historically evocative of the sculptural movement of contemporary Calder mobiles. Rendered in lushly matte gouache, the material itself echoing the lucid dreamlike contemplative feel of the work with its soft yet no less richly saturated pigmentation. We see fabric folds in candy reds, pinks and teals, the crisp coffee black slouched shoulder and hung head of the main character outlined and highlighted in chalky chocolate brown, an entangled system of twigs, stems, petals and fronds vibrant blooms of primary hues, the stoic blue of the clock face with decisive numerals, and the autumnal yellows and ochers of the backing wall awash with dancing structural and spectral shadows.

Lawrence confidentially leans into the language of abstraction more than one might expect, aptly addressing the ethereal conceptual abstract of time in this painting, while still staying tethered to the representational ground of his hallmark Humanism. The artist tellingly stated, “The Human subject is the most important thing. My work is abstract in the sense of having been designed and composed, but it is not abstract in the sense of having no human content I want to communicate. I want the idea to strike right away.” In Time the idea sure does strike, like the ring of the daily alarm clock and the ultimate toll of the bell that in many ways defines what it is to be human and mortal. Amplifying the philosophical headiness of the painting is the self-conscious enigmatic quality, accentuated by the furtive body language of the central figure and the strange, layered patterning of the enveloping foliage. It is the ambiguity of the human circumstance represented that makes the work so alive, at once compellingly intriguing and relatably accessible, evergreen in concept and content. As viewers, we are captivated, not just unable to look away, but fully sucked into the forward marching allegory of the powerful pressure and influence the sands of time have on us all, transfixed by the ticking hands of the clock hoping to discover just what time it is right now. Something is happening here in this seemingly simple fleeting moment captured, something both personal and transcendent, something inescapably human as signified by the reality and existential awareness of numbered days. The inherent power of the work, beyond the obvious and objective aesthetic merits, is that Lawrence translates his deep and sensitive understanding of humanity by displaying that everyday mysteries are just as mysterious as the timeless variety.