One "Great Thing" that came out bad

This will be the penultimate Metropolitan Museum of Art post from last trip. This set of images did not come out good and is hard to explain, so I'll get better images next time.

Image of Native Americans from the show

These are 2 pictures I took from a set of images called "The American Struggle, by Jacob Lawrence". Lawrence was a famous African-American Modernist painter. I'm just going to paraphrase the write up here (link to Museum write up) 

These  set of paintings are set from 1775 through 1817, the full set was supposed to include 60 paintings (later ones were suppose to go through WWI). They were painted at the height of Joe McCarthy's "Red Scare" and depict time from colonization to Patrick Henry's "Liberty" speech to Westward Expansion. As an African American modernist, he included many images of Native Americans, people of color and women - as well as the traditional European white male. they are 12x16 tempura images.

They are small (12 x 16). As they were set at eye level, it was a calming experience to follow the story around the intimate gallery space the Met set up.

As I said, my pictures of this are not good. but here are two:

“We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country! —petition of many slaves 1773,” Panel 5 (1955) from “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954–56), by Jacob Lawrence. Egg tempera on hardboard. (Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross/Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation/Artists Rights Society)

Cannons

Interestingly, I saw this show immediately after I saw this image, which I loved. This was completed by  a French Modernist. Although the French piece if more famous, I think the colors and emotion comes out more in Lawrence's much smaller paintings.

Mr. Lawrence's other paintings (at least those on that are the web) are more "modernist", and least abstract. I like these at the Met. I was annoyed I didn't get a catalogue. But, I'll be back.

Here is the Washington Post Review of the show when it started this year in Salem Mass.

America was founded by people who breathed that air. There were winners and losers, and their story is one of convulsive struggle. It is that struggle that Jacob Lawrence made the subject of 30 small paintings depicting key moments in early American history.

“Struggle: From the History of the American People” had never, until now, been shown in a museum. It was dispersed soon after its first showing at a New York gallery in 1956. Its reappearance, 63 years later, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem is an occasion to celebrate. The show opens ahead of a two-year national tour that will take it to New York, Birmingham, Seattle and Washington at the Phillips Collection.

“Struggle” is a national treasure. It is a work of sustained brilliance by one of America’s finest artists working at the height of his powers. Even though Lawrence originally planned 60 panels, and even though, of the 30 he painted, five have gone missing, the art testifies to a level of ambition that still astounds.