“Untitled” (America) | Art & Artists

Jacob Lawrence’s War Series evokes the regimentation, community, and displacement that the artist experienced firsthand during World War II, in which he served as a Coast Guard artist on the first racially integrated naval ship in United States history. Lawrence rendered these scenes using his characteristic flattened planes and silhouetted figures, rejecting naturalistic detail in favor of bold, semi-abstract forms. The series is an early example of Lawrence’s signature approach of responding to a single theme across multiple paintings; these panels (seven of the total fourteen are shown here) testify to Lawrence’s commitment to dynamic visual storytelling and his belief that one cannot “tell a story in a single painting.”