The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jacob Lawrence · sixty panels in casein tempera on hardboard, each about 12 by 18 inches (30.5 by 45.7 cm), each with a numbered caption written by the painter · first shown as The Migration of the Negro · painted in Harlem, New York, 1940 to 1941 · the thirty odd-numbered panels in the Phillips Collection, Washington, the thirty even-numbered in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 1942 · the sixty scored as one series, every panel surviving, the whole divided between two houses
Mode
Modern history painting as a numbered sequence of image and caption; documentary history in a flat modernist idiom
Mythos
Exodus built as the architecture of a modern history: bondage and its causes, departure, journey, a promised land that is not what was promised, and the people still coming
Phase
Captions researched and written first; the sixty panels painted together, colour by colour, in Harlem, 1940 to 1941; shown at the Downtown Gallery late in 1941; divided by odd and even numbers between two museums in 1942
Presentation
Sixty panels, each about 12 by 18 inches, casein tempera on hardboard, each with its numbered caption, hung in order
Register
The level voice of a chronicle: black, browns, ochre, a strong green, a blue, a red and white, flat and little mixed; terror and hope kept at one distance
Scale
A people over a decade, in panels the size of a page: about 8.4 square metres of painted surface, about 27 metres laid end to end
Governing Proposition
Sixty small panels, each with a sentence beneath it, tell the movement of Black Americans from the rural South to the industrial North as a history painting with no hero: the reasons for leaving named one by one, violence, law and labour; the departure by train; and a North that gives the vote and the schoolroom and also riots, crowded rooms and a colour line. The wager of the series is that a people’s choice can be painted as a people’s, that the size of an event can be carried by a count, and that a flat modernist idiom can do the work of documentary history.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Jacob Lawrence, born in 1917, was twenty-three and living in Harlem when he began the series in 1940, with the support of a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. He had already painted three narrative series, on Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, each a life told in numbered panels. This time the subject was not a hero but a people: the movement of Black Americans out of the rural South into the cities of the North in the decades around the First World War, an event of his parents’ lifetime. He called it The Migration of the Negro.
He began with words. The captions were researched and written first, in the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, in the Schomburg collection, the same building that held Aaron Douglas’s murals Aspects of Negro Life. Then sixty panels of hardboard were gessoed together, with the help of Gwendolyn Knight, and painted in casein tempera, by the painter’s own account one colour at a time across all sixty, from the darkest to the lightest. The history was carried forward together, as one body, the way the people it tells of moved.
The palette is a few hues, flat and little mixed: black, browns, ochre, a strong green, a blue, a red and white. Each panel is about 12 by 18 inches, and each has its numbered caption, one sentence in the plain voice of a chronicle. Together the panels cover about 8.4 square metres, less than a single large canvas of the period; laid end to end at the long side they would run about 27 metres. The work is large by count and small in every unit, and that is its scale.
Movement II
The first panel is a railway station. A crowd presses toward three gates, marked for Chicago, New York and St. Louis, and moves as one body in one direction. The event is stated before its causes: people are leaving, in numbers, and they are choosing where to go. The rest of the series is the account of why, and of what they found.
The reasons come panel by panel, and they are reasons, not a drift. Floods, the boll weevil and failed crops ruin the land; wages are low and food is dear; labour agents come south from the Northern industries, and the Black press urges departure. Then the harder causes. A panel of courts that did not protect. The handcuffed men, seen from behind, their wrists joined. And the lynching panel: an empty landscape, a bare branch, a rope, one figure folded over on the ground, and nothing else. It is the smallest statement in the series and the strongest, a terror made of absence, and it says with a branch and a rope what no caption could add to.
Not every cause needs its own panel. In the middle of the catalogue several panels state one cause, poverty, in parallel, and two or three could go without the loss of a fact. Some of those panels are slight, a few figures against a field, and here the even tread of the sequence carries what the single image has not earned. But the mass is the subject, and sixty is a multitude: the count is partly the argument’s and partly the painter’s choice, and the frame of the cycle holds it.
Movement III
The shape of the series is the shape of Exodus: bondage and its causes, the decision, the departure by night and by train, the journey, the arrival in a land that is promised and is not what was promised, and the people continuing to come. The protagonist is a people, as in the book, and the particular stays particular: these trains, these stations, Pittsburgh steel, Chicago, East St. Louis. Black American tradition had long read its own history through Exodus, in the spirituals and from the pulpit. The series makes that reading the architecture of a modern history painting, and never names it.
The form is the migration. The panels follow one another, the figures move almost always in one direction, and the viewer walks the sequence as the migrants travelled. Repeated figures and bundles run down a diagonal and set a crowd moving; a green or a red is placed to carry the eye from one panel to the next. The caption makes each panel a sentence and the whole a book that can be hung on a wall and read in order. Painted as one canvas or one mural, the event would be a scene; painted as sixty, its size is the count.
The idiom is modernist, flat cut shapes without modelling, drawn from Cubism and from the posters and patterned interiors of Harlem, and it is put to work that realism and the documentary photograph of the 1930s had claimed. History painting had heroes; this one has none. The figures are without faces or nearly so, and they are drawn schematically, at times more awkwardly than the idiom requires. The paint is thin and matte, and the touch has little range. What is commanded is design: the silhouette, the placing, one key held across sixty panels at once.
Movement IV
The North is not the promised land. There are wages, the vote and the schoolroom; there are also riots, rooms crowded and dear, and a colour line in the unions. The arrival is undercut as steadily as the departure was argued, and the myth the series builds is half taken apart by the series that builds it. That is its truth: the Great Migration was a collective act by people who had reasons, and the place they went to was another place of struggle.
One law governs the whole. Set the lynching panel, a branch and a folded figure in an empty field, beside a panel of schoolgirls at a blackboard in a Northern school: they are made the same way, flat shapes in a few unmixed colours, figures nearly faceless, a sentence beneath, every event seen at the same middle distance. Floods and trains, riots, churches, steel mills and tenements, violence, labour, faith, law, the family and the city all fall under it, and the tone runs from terror to hope without a change of voice. Where the law becomes formula, a panel passes on the strength of the sequence; elsewhere nothing breaks it.
The distance is the cost. The orders of reality the series holds are many, labour, the state, violence, the land, the family, the sacred, the city and history, and one structure, the journey, places them. But the migrants are a people and rarely persons. No single inner life is entered, and the elevation that comes, comes in a few places: the lynching, the handcuffed men, the crowd pressing at the first gate and the last. The rest is held level on purpose, at the distance of report, in panels the size of a page.
Movement V
The last panel returns to the station. The platform is crowded again, and the caption reads “And the migrants kept coming”. The first and the last together make a cycle that does not close: the series ends with the event still under way. It was first shown at the Downtown Gallery in New York, Edith Halpert’s, late in 1941, after a selection had been reproduced in Fortune that November, and it made Lawrence, at twenty-four, the first widely known Black American modernist.
In 1942 it was bought and divided by a rule of parity: the thirty odd-numbered panels went to the Phillips Collection in Washington, the thirty even-numbered to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A series about a people divided by a line was itself divided, and has since been seen as a whole only on occasions, among them the tour of the 1940s, the exhibition of 1993 and the large exhibition at the Modern in 2015, which set it beside the migration’s writers, musicians and photographers. In 1993 the painter revised his captions, in wording rather than sense; both texts stand on record. Every panel survives. Casein on hardboard is brittle, and the panels travel seldom.
On this desk it stands at 8.3, in Tier IV, level with Hopper’s Nighthawks and a tenth below The Bayeux Tapestry, the nearest form, a long narrative of images and words, which has nine centuries of study behind it, and below Lange’s Migrant Mother, both at 8.4. The summit is closed to it by the Exodus it builds and partly unbuilds, by a swerve that was a step from its painter’s own earlier series, and by a reach that is foundational in its tradition and narrower in a field that turned to abstraction. Within that tradition it stands behind the narrative and history painting that followed, and the migrants are still coming.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged panel by panel and as a count. The frame panels cannot go: the first, a station crowd pressed toward three gates marked Chicago, New York and St. Louis, states the event; the last, the platform crowded again under the caption “And the migrants kept coming”, leaves it open, and together they make a cycle that does not close. The lynching panel cannot go, nor the handcuffed men seen from behind, nor the riots, nor the crowded housing of the North: each is a cause or a cost the argument needs. What yields is the middle of the catalogue of causes, where floods, the boll weevil, failed crops, low wages and dear food state one cause, poverty, in parallel. The count is partly compelled and partly permitted.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, and it holds: the Great Migration was a collective act, chosen by people who had reasons, and the reasons were violence, law and labour, not a drift of population. The series names them panel by panel: lynching, courts that did not protect, the boll weevil and the floods, the labour agents sent south, the Black press urging departure. And it refuses the promised land: the North has riots, crowded and costly housing and a colour line in the unions, beside the vote, the schoolroom and wages. The images carry the hardest propositions, the lynching above all. Held below the top because some propositions are the captions’, and the images illustrate them.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is real and comes in a few places rather than across the run. The lynching panel is the height: an empty landscape, a bare branch, a rope, one figure folded over on the ground, and nothing else, a terror made of absence. The handcuffed men, their backs to us and their wrists joined, are a second height of the same cold kind. The first and last panels lift by mass, the crowd as one body pressing one way. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency and size: much of the sequence is held level by design, a register of report, flat colour, the same distance from every event, and a panel the size of a page keeps grandeur out. The restraint is right for the work, and costs the axis.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The archetype is Exodus, and it is built, not summoned. The structure of the series is the structure of the story: bondage and its causes, the decision, the departure by night and by train, the journey, the arrival in a land that is promised and is not what was promised, and the people continuing to come. The protagonist is a people, as in the book, and the particular stays particular: these stations, Pittsburgh steel, Chicago, East St. Louis. Held below the gate because the archetype is carried by the sequence more than deepened in any single image, and because the arrival is undercut so steadily that the myth is half dismantled by the work that builds it, which is its truth and limits its depth as myth.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance: history painting and its heroes; the narrative cycle in prints and murals, from Goya’s series to the Mexican muralists, and Aaron Douglas’s Aspects of Negro Life in the library where the captions were written; the social realism and documentary photography of the 1930s; and Lawrence’s own three biographical series. The departure: a history painting with no hero, its protagonist an anonymous mass; an event of the painter’s parents’ lifetime treated as epic; a flat, cut, unmodelled idiom, drawn from Cubism and from Harlem’s posters and patterned interiors, put to a documentary task realism had claimed. Held below the gate because the serial form and the flat idiom were already his: from Toussaint L’Ouverture this is a step, not a break.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute a single canvas or a mural and most of what the work knows goes. The series form is the migration: one panel after another, the figures moving almost always in one direction, the count itself the size of the event, so that a viewer walks the sequence as the migrants travelled. The caption makes each panel a sentence and the whole a book that can be hung, a history read in order. The method is part of the knowledge: one palette carried across sixty panels at once, so that each panel is a part of a body and none is a picture alone. Held a step below the top because the caption sometimes does work the form could have done, and a few panels illustrate their sentence rather than require it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: about eighty-five years of continuous institutional presence, and two rereadings of weight, the reunion of the sixty with the painter’s revised captions in 1993, and the large exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015, which set the series beside the migration’s writers, musicians and photographers. The open questions are real: whether it is history painting, modernism or a picture book, and whether that question is false; what the captions of 1993 gain and lose against those of 1941; how far its North is celebration and how far indictment; what fifty years of division did to its reading. But much of each panel is given at first sight, by design, and the literature, though growing, is smaller than the fame.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is American painting, and African American art, in the 1940s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a history painting could be about and who could be its subject, and of what the flat modernist idiom could carry: documentary history, at the scale of a people, in sequence. Against it, American painting at large went the other way in the decade that followed, into abstraction, and the series redirected little of that mainstream. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within African American art it is foundational; it made Lawrence, at twenty-four, the first widely known Black American modernist; later Black American painters have named him as a model; and its wide presence in schoolrooms and reproduction is presence, not pressure.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about eighty-five years. Form: whole. All sixty panels survive with their captions, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost; the painter’s revision of the captions in 1993 changed wording rather than sense, and both texts stand on record. Presence: continuous since 1941, in two major public collections and in schools, and its standing has risen. But the unit is divided: since 1942 each museum holds half, and the sixty have been seen together only on occasions, among them the tour of the 1940s and the exhibitions of 1993 and 2015. A series whose argument is its sequence is usually seen as half of itself. Fabric: casein tempera on hardboard is brittle, prone to flaking, and the panels travel seldom.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as command of tempera on panel at small scale. The making is load-bearing in design: cut, flat shapes; silhouettes that read at a glance; a figure or a bundle repeated down a diagonal to set a crowd moving; one green or one red placed to carry the eye from panel to panel. The colour-by-colour method holds sixty panels to one key, a feat of control, and the lynching panel shows the most economy: almost nothing, all of it placed. The costs are charged: the drawing of figures is schematic and at times awkward beyond what the idiom requires; the paint is thin and the touch has little range; a number of the middle panels are slight, a few figures against a field, and invention is uneven along the run.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the lynching panel, a branch and a folded figure in an empty field, and a Northern panel of schoolgirls at a blackboard, learning. One law governs both: flat shapes in a few unmixed colours, figures without faces or nearly so, a caption of one sentence in the plain voice of a chronicle, every event at the same middle distance. Nothing in sixty panels breaks it, from floods and trains to riots, churches, steel mills and tenements, and the range is wide, across violence, labour, faith, law, the family and the city, from terror to hope, without a change of voice. Held below the top only where the law becomes formula, and the even tread of the sequence carries a panel that has not earned its place.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders are held, and one structure, the journey, integrates most of them: labour, in the fields, the steel mills, the railroads and the labour agents; the state and the law, in the courts, the vote and the police; violence, in the lynching and the riots; the natural order, in the floods, the boll weevil and the failed crops; the family, in the households that left and those that stayed; the sacred, in the churches and in Exodus as the shape of the whole; the city; and history, at the scale of a people. That is far more than a single canvas holds, and the series form is what lets it. What holds the axis lower is consciousness: the migrants are a people and rarely persons, and no single inner life is entered.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, and The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 8.6. Sixty panels surviving whole with their captions and seen continuously since 1941; one law of flat colour and level voice across terror and hope; a collective act disclosed as chosen, with its reasons named; and a form in which the count is the size of the event.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.6, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 7.9, and The Inevitable at 8.0: elevation in a few places, held level elsewhere by design; a clarity that gives much of each panel at first sight; a people seen from outside, rarely persons; and a middle catalogue of causes that partly repeats itself. Behind the gate stand The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, each at 8.3.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. The twelve sum to 99.4, an average of 8.28 that displays 8.3.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Migration Series, first shown as The Migration of the Negro: sixty panels in casein tempera on hardboard, each about 12 by 18 inches, each with a numbered caption, painted by Jacob Lawrence in Harlem in 1940 and 1941 with the support of a Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship; well in outline and in its best-known panels, unevenly panel by panel through the middle of the sequence. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the sixty panels as one series, with their captions. Since the purchase of 1942 the thirty odd-numbered panels have been held by the Phillips Collection, Washington, and the thirty even-numbered by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; every panel survives, and the division is weighed on The Imperishable only. The painter’s revision of the captions in 1993 is his own later hand on the text, and is weighed there as a change to what survives. His earlier series on Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and his later series, are context and are not scored. One caption is quoted, the last; the first is not quoted in either of its forms. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them which panels are upright, the number of panels reproduced in Fortune, the numbers of individual panels other than the first and last, the title of the exhibition of 2015 and any other occasion on which the sixty were shown together, any technical examination of the method, whether the purchase of 1942 was the first of a Black painter’s work by the Museum of Modern Art, and which later painters have named Lawrence as a model.