THE EPIC IN THE ORDINARY : The painting of Jacob Lawrence.

The artist Jacob Lawrence died in Seattle on June 9. Reading his obituary in the New York Times, I looked up at the poster over my desk announcing a 1992 exhibit of his work at the Phillips Collection in Washington. It shows a painting with the number fifty-seven scrawled in the lower right corner. 57 depicts a black woman, head bent, laboring over a large washing trough pushing soaking clothes with a long pole. Against a background of gray, green, and

black rectangles, an abstract rendering of wash hanging, she stands out, a stable triangle, in a white coverall. Her red washing pole, held straight up, seems to anchor her in place. Yellow, orange, gray, and black amorphous-shaped garments in the trough echo the colors of the abstract and rectangular ironing board, clothes hamper, and shadows behind her. She is at once sorrow and stability. Sadness and gratitude wash over me as I gaze at her.

Washing machines replaced the wash tub and their mechanical agitators replaced women poling their clothes in steaming, sudsy water. During World War II, washing machines were forfeited to the war effort, however, and my mother, like the woman on the poster, poled clothes in stationary tubs in our basement. A small child, I watched as she stirred and lifted my father's work clothes and my sister's diapers. Of course there was a difference: my mother was doing our family's laundry. The woman in Lawrence's painting was doing the laundry of another family, Southern, white, and rural; she was cheap black labor ready at hand. When I look at the poster, I see her plowing and plunging her pole, but I also see my mother.

My sadness rises at the thought of this never-ending and backbreaking labor; my gratitude lies in its demise. No one uses poles today; no one slaves over hot tubs; even the poorest go to the laundromat, in the United States, at least. Race, region, and class separate the woman in the picture and my mother, yet in my mind's eye, they are silent sharers in this common labor.

Is my comparison inappropriate, an accident of biography? Lawrence's image, after all, is not of a Chicago housewife, but a stark and simple abstract painting of a black woman living in the residue of a slave society. Or is Lawrence inviting us to meditate on all human want and suffering? He certainly worked on a larger canvas (actually gessoed masonite and tempera) than political protest and racial advocacy. Though his images are of the black experience, his work invites us to consider that this is, in many respects, everyone's American experience. For Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times art critic, Lawrence conveys "a sense of the epic with an appreciation of the ordinary--or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he appreciates the epic in the ordinary." And it is true, as Kimmelman goes on to note, that this allows Lawrence "to paint horrific and momentous events without rant or pomposity....His art values fairness and accuracy at the same time that it abstracts big subjects into precise symbols" (November 14, 1993).

The picture of the laundress is designated 57 because it is fifty-seventh in a series of sixty paintings Lawrence created in 1941. Earlier efforts included multipicture series on the lives of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. The Migration of the Negro recounts the vast movement of Southern rural blacks to the urban North after World War I. (The caption on 57 reads, "The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South"--indeed, the stable shape of her white coverall anchored by the red pole suggests she may be there still.) In contrast, 1 in the series is all vitality and movement; a black multitude streams in diagonals toward train platforms marked "Chicago," "New York," "St. Louis." (Lawrence's caption reads, "Around the time I was born, many African Americans from the South left home and traveled to cities in the North in search of a better life. My family was part of the great migration.") Seeing this picture at the Phillips show, I viscerally grasped Chicago's troubled race relations at the time I was growing up in the fifties.

The image of the train and train station recurs in the series with ever-larger crowds in each picture, and concludes with number 60, a solid band of travelers impatiently standing at the platform's edge, a horizontal band of form and color anticipating the train that will speed them away. This image of decisive movement alternates with others: a family cowering in the corner of their simple, wooden house as they consider the consequences of flight--the cowering captured by a flattened perspective; or the standoffish attitude of Northern blacks rendered by the looming figures of a well-dressed couple. Lawrence's work is pointed but not tendentious. Any viewer can see in the sixty pictures, when they are gathered in one place (half are owned by the Phillips; half by New York's Museum of Modern Art), the fear- and hope-filled story of all who left the known "old" world for the unknown, and not always welcoming, new one.

History and story were powerful elements in the art of the '20s and '30s when Lawrence was a student at the Utopia Children's Center in Harlem and later as a high school drop-out at the Harlem Art Workshop. Recall the WPA post office mural projects or the works of William Johnson, Diego Rivera, Ben Shahn, and Jean Charlot (some of whose drawings continue to appear in Commonweal). Lawrence belongs to the post-Harlem Renaissance, post-WPA generation of painters. His work is figurative, but it is not social realism--abstract forms and colors shape the figures depicted in The Migration of the Negro, figures traversing bleak Southern landscapes (poverty, segregation, exploitation, drought, lynchings) and eerie Northern cityscapes (jobs, housing, education, yes, but also discrimination, beatings, and riots). This story is never sentimental or merely engaging because Lawrence's compositional genius renders powerful emotions and searing events not simply by visualizing them but evoking them.

Hung together, the sixty compositions (each 18 x 12 inches, some vertical, some horizontal), bring to mind other stories and other images: Stations of the Cross and the small pictures and portraits that make up large medieval altarpieces. Such visual narratives violate the taboo in much of modern American art against depicting and finding moral meaning in arduous labor, fearful and uneasy flight, suffering, hunger, courage, and death. Yet these never fail to open the mind and move the heart in the hands of a great artist. Jacob Lawrence was among that number.

Jacob Lawrence worked throughout his long life (1917-2000) as an artist and teacher (he was professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle). A retrospective of his work is scheduled for the Phillips Collection in 2001, and a seventy-two-foot-long mosaic that he designed will soon be installed in New York's Times Square subway station.

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is Commonweal's editor.