The Brooklyn Rail

American painter Jacob Lawrence’s (b. 1917, d. 2000) first European retrospective at Kunsthal KAdE corrects the record. The exhibition features seventy paintings, twenty-five drawings, and seventy-five prints created across seven decades, and positions Lawrence as modernism’s co-equal innovator. The artist’s work, grounded in the Black American experience, stands as neither derivative nor secondary to European movements. This show serves both as revelation and restitution, placing Lawrence alongside Diego Rivera’s muralist ambitions while affirming his kinship with Francisco de Goya and William Hogarth as a moral narrative force.

Entering the exhibition, audiences immediately confront Lawrence’s chromatic authority. Opening galleries establish his signature approach, through early Harlem works hung at eye level against white walls. Picture planes divided into flat zones, architectural spaces compressed into rhythmic patterns, human figures reduced to essential geometric forms: the visual grammar announces itself before any wall text intervenes. Moving closer reveals how Lawrence refuses illusionistic depth not as formal exercise but as pictorial democracy, where foreground figure and background architecture achieve equal visual weight. This spatial compression exerts an ethical position viewers feel physically: no element dominates, and no hierarchy asserts itself.

Where Pablo Picasso fractured physical bodies, Lawrence reconstructed social bodies. His flattened perspectives and intense color fields become a visual ethics depicting work, war, and worship. The distinction matters. In his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon theorized the fractured colonial subject; Lawrence gives that abstraction form and dignity through color and rhythm. W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness operates, as well, as an unseen geometry in Lawrence’s pictorial space: two planes of perception, one for self and one for society, compressed within single compositional fields that the viewer’s eye must navigate simultaneously.

Panels from Lawrence’s “Migration Series” anchor the exhibition’s central galleries. Created in 1940–41 when Lawrence was twenty-three years old, the sixty-panel sequence chronicles Black Americans’ mass movement from the Jim Crow South to northern cities. Kunsthal KAdE reunites fragments permanently divided between MoMA and the Phillips Collection; seeing them together generates a cumulative impact that wouldn’t be possible in their separated states. A Plan to Escape (Harriet and the Promised Land) (1967), part of Lawrence’s series on abolitionist Harriet Tubman, arrests movement through the galleries. Tubman, dressed in white, presses against a vibrant blue sky, arms spread wide, body suspended without ground line or horizon, four other people standing nearby, awaiting her guidance. The radical flattening translates historical escape into transcendent gesture. Standing before it, chromatic intensity generates spatial ambiguity that mirrors Tubman’s precariousness—audiences cannot locate her figure in space, cannot determine if she rises or falls, cannot separate aspiration from desperation. The work implicates the viewer in its urgency.

Galleries devoted to the “Migration Series” preparatory drawings reframe the encounter from chromatic immersion to linear intimacy. Eight framed studies hang in grid formation, their modest scale demanding viewers step close. Brown ink sketches on tan paper show figures reduced to essential contours, architectural elements mapped as intersecting planes. After the painted panels’ saturated intensity, these monochromatic studies feel like exhaling. The curatorial juxtaposition emphasizes serial methodology while creating breathing room within the exhibition’s rhythm.

Subsequent galleries present Harlem genre scenes with equivalent formal attention. Bar-B-Que (1942) translates a storefront facade into geometric zones: brick rendered as red and brown fields, windows as blue rectangles, signage integrated into overall pattern. Viewers can stand back, take in the composition’s architectural scaffolding, then move closer to examine how Lawrence treats daily life social space with modernist rigor, thereby refusing the sociological impulse of documentary realism.

The Last Journey (Harriet and the Promised Land)’s (1967) larger scale and dynamic composition pull audiences across the room. Executed in gouache, tempera, and graphite on paper, the work shows a horse-drawn cart surrounded by Black figures in motion, bold primaries creating rhythmic visual patterns. A white horse rears against gray sky, yanking the cart through space defined by color relationships rather than perspective. The painting operates at body scale—the viewer senses the horse’s upward thrust, the cart’s momentum, the figures’ collective movement as physical forces rather than depicted events.

The exhibition’s lower register, with horizontal vitrines positioned at waist height, grounds this compositional intensity in historical specificity. Audiences look down at archival photographs, documentary evidence, printed ephemera, and only then look up at paintings. This rhythm repeats throughout. Wall texts explain economic forces driving migration, Jim Crow violence, northern discrimination, positioned peripheral to the works themselves. The viewer can engage them or not; the paintings don’t depend on textual mediation to function. Accumulation becomes the dominant experience. Seven decades of work, consistent formal vocabulary applied to evolving historical subjects, serial thinking maintained across changing contexts, and the retrospective’s scope carry weight that individual paintings, however powerful, cannot achieve alone. Flight III Harriet (1967) returns to themes of escape and aspiration. Against ochre ground textured with vertical striations, a white horse elongates into rhythmic curves, smaller figures surrounding the central action.

This isn’t the recovery of a forgotten figure but rather the correction of institutional memory that always knew Lawrence’s importance yet failed to grant him equivalent European visibility. This retrospective exposes modernism’s geographical exclusions while expanding canonical narratives. Lawrence’s flattened perspectives and intense color fields emerge not despite but through their ethical imperatives: visual strategies inseparable from the histories they narrate.