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Estimate: $ 130,000 - $ 160,000
JACOB LAWRENCE (1917 - 2000) The Legend of John Brown.
Portfolio with complete text, printed folders and 22 color screenprints on Domestic Etching paper, 1977. Each 508x657 mm; 20x25 7/8 inches (sheets), full margins, loose as issued.
One of 60 signed and numbered copies (with 1 artist proof and 20 hors commerce copies). Signed by the artist and author and numbered 46/60 in pencil on the justification page. Each signed, dated and numbered 44/60 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Ives-Sillman, New Haven, with the blind stamp lower right. Published by the Founders Society of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, with the blind stamp lower right.
Superb impressions with vibrant and bright colors. With the printed poem John Brown by Robert Hayden, and the original linen-covered slip case.
John Brown and his heroic actions were the inspiration for a generation, in addition to such artists as William Henry Johnson and Charles White, during the turbulent social and political decades of Lawrence's youth. John Brown had taken on the militant struggle of achieving freedom for African Americans with a single-mindedness and drive that overcame failures, bankruptcy and defeat. Lawrence's historical cycle succinctly describes each chapter of his mission from his early beginnings until his final fateful raid on Harpers Ferry with an accompanying descriptive title. Upon his 1847 meeting with Brown for the first time, Federick Douglass stated that, "though a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery." It was at this meeting that Brown first outlined his plan to Douglass to lead a war to free slaves. Brown is shown organizing early liberation raids in the Adirondacks, assisting the Underground Railroad and the Kansas militias of the mid-1850s, when the status of free or slave state was decided. The last 8 prints show how Brown finally led the 21 men who stormed and briefly held the fort of Harpers Ferry in 1859. Lawrence captures not only the physical action but he uses composition and colors to symbolize the spiritual burdens of a devout Christian, and the rise of black militancy and nationalism in the United States. John Brown's call to arms turned the Abolitionist movement into the life and death struggle that many blacks had to endure. His trial for treason and hanging cemented his martyrdom as national legend. "He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. . . .," said Henry David Thoreau in an address to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts. "No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature. . . ."
Based on Lawrence's 1941 series of 22 gouache and tempera paintings The Life of John Brown, this set of prints was commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Jacob Lawrence used his first of three successive Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship to complete the series of paintings - the same year he married Gwendolyn Knight. The 23-year old artist had already received extraordinary attention for his earlier historical series of paintings Frederick Douglass, The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Harriet Tubman and The Migration Series. These original works from The Life of John Brown were too fragile for traveling exhibitions by the time of the Whitney retrospective in 1974. Due to extensive paint loss, the Institute had to decline the request for their loan for this exhibition. Ives-Sillmann re-created with the artist the series in order to bring the works to a broader public. The portfolio is a tour-de-force of screenprint printmaking: each of the screenprints were made through hand-cut film stencils and displays the precision that had previously attracted artists such as Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt to Ives-Sillman. Romare Bearden and Harry B. Henderson, Jr., A History of African-American Artists, p. 300. Nesbett L77-5.
