Jacob Lawrence
The Brown Angel

The Brown Angel

© The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Brown Angel
The Brown Angel
ArtistAmerican, 1917–2000
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • The Brown Angel
Date1959
Made inUnited States
MediumTempera on gesso panel
DimensionsPanel: 23 5/16 × 19 1/4 in. (59.2 × 48.9 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Foundation, with additional funds provided by the African American Art Advisory Association and ExxonMobil
Object number2004.202
Not on view

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Object Type
Description

One of the most prominent and prolific American painters of the 20th century, Jacob Lawrence pioneered a Modernist pictorial style while retaining a personal commitment to the figurative. He launched his painting career in Social Realism, the result of his studies with the Works Progress Administration and the Harlem Art Workshop in the 1930s. In the two decades that followed, Lawrence produced a number of paintings that depict nightlife, of which "The Brown Angel" is exemplary.

 Lawrence renders the interior of a bar with an intense compositional dynamism, bold patches of flattened color, and an overall sense of patterning. But these edgy, splintered forms also point to a larger feeling of social unease. The schematic figures and the fractured bar lend an air of tension and disquiet, one that relays the collective anxiety of the black community on the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement. In this scene, painted after the Supreme Court's 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, desegregation and its violent backlash loom overhead, much like the timekeeping brown angel who overlooks all.


 


Provenance[The Alan Gallery, New York]; Mr. and Mrs. Irving Levick, Buffalo; [Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, June 4, 1982, lot 182]; [Terry Dintenfass Inc., New York]; [Gerhard Wurzer Gallery, Houston]; purchased by MFAH, 2004.
Exhibition History"Acquisitions of the Last Five Years: Selections of Modern and Contemporary Art," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 15–October 15, 2005.

"Houston Collects: African American Art," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 31–October 26, 2008.

"American Made: 250 Years of American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 7, 2012–January 2, 2013.

"Art Across America," National Museum of Korea, Seoul, February 4–May 19, 2013; Daejeon Museum of Art, Korea, June 17–September 1, 2013.

"The Visual Blues," Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, March 8–July 13, 2014; Telfair Museum of Art, Jepson Center for the Arts, Savannah, Georgia, January 30–May 3, 2015.

"Imprinted: Illustrating Race," Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, June 11–October 30, 2022.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Signed lower right: "Jacob Lawrence 59"

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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