Jacob Lawrence Serigraph for John Hersey's "Hiroshima", 1983

Item Details

Jacob Lawrence (New York/New Jersey, 1917 – 2000)
Untitled, 1983
Serigraph on paper
Unsigned
Pulled from Hiroshima by John Hersey
Published by The Limited Editions Club, New York
Printed by The Studio Heinrici, New York
Includes a photocopy of tirage page from book

A serigraph on paper by renowned African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, from his 1983 Hiroshima series. Lawrence’s series consisted of eight panels in which he reinterpreted John Hersey’s landmark report of the World War II nuclear bombing, originally published in the New Yorker in 1946. In 1983, Hersey’s report was republished by The Limited Editions Club and featured serigraphs of Lawrence’s panels. For the series, Lawrence took into account several survivors mentioned in Hersey’s report and portrayed them as anonymous skeletal figures in an abstract, distorted manner to inspire empathy from the viewer.

Jacob Lawrence, a prominent African American artist, was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917, and in 1930, several years after his father abandoned the family, moved with his mother to New York. There, at the age of twelve he began studying with Charles Alston (New York/North Carolina, 1907 – 1977) at the Harlem Community Art Center. He is best known for his narrative paintings, and often worked in large series including the first that gained him recognition, a satirical portrayal of street life in Harlem, completed in 1937. He went on to complete series on notable historical figures Frederic Douglass and Harriet Tubman, followed by his best known works, The Migration Series, that illustrated the movement of black Americans from the South to the North following World War I, which was turned into a traveling exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1946 he was invited by Josef Albers to join the faculty of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and after teaching stints at the Art Students League in New York, the New School for Social Research and the Pratt Institute he finally settled in Seattle Washington where he was a professor of art at the University of Washington.

Condition

- slight nick along left edge where trimmed from book.

Dimensions

- measures print.

Item #

ITMG420577