MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
‘I am part of the black community, so I am the black community speaking’
Christine Lindey pays tribute to the great Afro-American artist JACOB LAWRENCE who throughout his painting promoted the interests of his class and race
(L to R) Ironers; Wounded Man
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
JACOB LAWRENCE (1917- 2000) was precocious and prolific and his early critical success continued throughout his long life.
Yet, compared with his white US peers such as Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning, who has heard of him?
He was seven years old when his mother became a single parent and, after a few years in a foster home, he moved to Harlem with his mother and siblings where she earned her living as domestic help. The sights, sounds, dramas, joys and hardships of Harlem life would become the main subject of his paintings.
More from this author
CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s
CHRISTINE LINDEY guides us through the vivid expressionism of a significant but apolitical group of pre WWI artists in Germany
CHRISTINE LINDEY salutes an outstanding exhibition imbued with a sense of national guilt
CHRISTINE LINDEY surveys the cosmopolitan, enigmatic compositions of an idiosyncratic artist whose work speaks of mystery and exile
