{"data":{"id":"759","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":759,"topgoose_id":1604,"tms_id":759,"display_name":"Jacob Lawrence","sort_name":"Lawrence Jacob","display_date":"1917–2000","begin_date":"1917","end_date":"2000","biography":"\u003cp\u003eJacob Lawrence used his art to tell the epic story of African Americans’ struggle for freedom and justice. Growing up in Harlem during the 1930s, Lawrence was exposed to leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance, who inspired him to delve into the history of his community. By the decade’s end he had developed his signature approach: series of works in multiple panels centered on a single theme. With this format, Lawrence sought to instill his narratives with pictorial grandeur and to address complex histories he felt could not be effectively portrayed in a single image.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1946, with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lawrence began work on the \u003ca href=\"/collection/works?q[search_cont]=Jacob+Lawrence+War+Series\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eWar Series\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, the first of his multipart works to document both a personal and historical experience—his service in World War II, during which he was stationed on the first racially integrated naval ship in United States history. Although he conceived of the project during the war and based the series of fourteen panels on his own memories, each also reflects broadly on the experience of war—from the drudgery of a nighttime patrol or the cramped quarters of a ship’s hold to the terror of being detained as a prisoner of war. Lawrence rendered these scenes using his characteristic flattened planes and silhouetted figures, eschewing modeling and perspective in favor of bold, semiabstracted forms. \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/2117\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eVictory\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, the last work in the series, contains none of the exuberance one might expect from its title. Rather, the image’s subdued palette and solitary soldier—hunched over, his expression inaccessible—present a somber vision of the war’s end.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"gray\"\u003eDana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, \u003ca href=\"https://shop.whitney.org/products/whitney-handbook-of-the-collection\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHandbook of the Collection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 221.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":true,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500027690","wikidata_id":"Q355566","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:31:37.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-11T07:03:53.231-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/759/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/759/exhibitions"}}}}