Life itself - being alive - has a rhythm. But the bigger part is Lawrence’s sense of pictorial rhythm - his own, wholly original adaptation of Picasso’s and Braque’s cubism. Lawrence painted in tempera, a fast-drying, egg-based medium that binds colored pigments and has none of oil paint’s translucency. Instead of being transparent and airy, like a view through a freshly washed window, they’re airless, angular, slightly resistant. His vision was kaleidoscopic, attentive to peculiarities and always a little opaque. Lawrence’s scenes of everyday life tend to be modestly scaled (this one is 24 by 30 inches, quite large for him) but they’re dense with life. The stick’s handle is hooked around the forearm of a woman who grips her daughters’ shoulders as, under a cop’s eye, they negotiate the gorgeous anarchy at the intersection of Fulton and Nostrand streets, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. But no: it’s unmistakably a cat, and that line resembling a leash is actually a shadow cast by a walking stick. The creature’s neck appears connected to a taut black line that my eyes initially read as a leash, so that I almost mistook it for a dog. It casts a spiky, syncopated shadow, like a chord cluster by Thelonious Monk. In the foreground of “Fulton and Nostrand,” which hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art, is a cat. But there remains in all his jaunty, swaying scenes of communal life a secretive, feline quality, as if he were determined to retain a right to solitude, to singularity. His stylized, anonymized crowd pictures perfectly conjure the idea of the hive mind: the buzz and whir of collective intelligence. I sometimes wonder if Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) wasn’t a little Byronic.
“I only go out,” wrote Lord Byron, “to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.” Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript.
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