Jacob Lawrence: Toussaint L'Ouverture Series: Krannert Art Museum

If you are in the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois area, I recommend you stop by the Krannert Art Museum and take a close look at a great exhibit: Jacob Lawrence: Toussant L’Ouverture Series. The exhibit will run through April 28, 2013 and showcases all forty-one of the panels chronicling L’Ouverture’s epic struggle ot emancipate Haiti from the tyranny o fhte Spanish and French in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Jacob Lawrence was only twenty-one years old when he completed the monumental series in 1938, setting the standard for Lawrence's lifelong dedication to the visual description of African American life and history within a narrative context and pays tribute to the hero of the Haitian revolution who in the late 18th century defeated Napoleon and drove him from Haiti.

Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Jacob Lawrence was raised in Harlem where he not only witnessed the poverty and prejudice that most African-Americans faced in the early 20th century, but also the remarkable cultural, intellectual and political development known as the Harlem Renaissance. Lawrence reached maturity in the 1930s, at a time when Harlem was among the world's most dynamic centers of aesthetic and social innovation. As orators shouted their messages from nearly every street corner in Harlem, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke were challenging and redefining the very identity of the African-American people; Langston Hughes was introducing the black experience to modernist poetry; Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway retooled jazz and African-American blues for the big band and the orchestra; and such artists as Aaron Douglas, Charles Alston, Archibald Motley, Loïs Mailou Jones, Romare Bearden and William H. Johnson introduced an expressive force to modern painting few had ever witnessed. It was against the backdrop of this vibrant milieu that the 20-year-old Jacob Lawrence made a dramatic debut with his Toussaint L'Ouverture Series.

For the series, Lawrence painted forty-one small tempera-on-white-paper works that chronologically documented the history of the Haitian revolution from Columbus's discovery of the island on December 6, 1492, through Toussaint's victory over the French with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on January 1, 1804. Instead of traditional titles, Lawrence utilized descriptive quotations to function as a verbal description and to accentuate the narrative theme of the series. For instance, General Toussaint L'Ouverture, number twenty in the series, is labeled "statesman and military genius, esteemed by the Spaniards, feared by the English, dreaded by the French, hated by the planters, and revered by the blacks."

Pairing these descriptive quotations with the painted panels moves beyond a storyboard, resembling something closer to a graphic novel. When viewed in the two rooms of the Krannert, however, the graphic novel effect transforms into a visual experience that draws on cinematic techniques. Panels become cels, with the viewer tracking and panning like a camera to view the visual narrative, complete with descriptive intertitles.  This narrative “film” is both an historical and personal triumph well worth seeing.

The Toussaint L’Ouverture series (1937–38) is on loan from the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University and is an important focus for the University of Illinois’ commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King and celebration of the Sesquicentennial Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (1862).