Jacob Lawrence, There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to.—Washington, 26 December 1786, a 1956 work in egg tempura on hardboard from the series Struggle: From the History of the American People
© The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
In a bit of serendipity, a missing painting in an epic series by Jacob Lawrence has been located and will be reunited with others in a travelling exhibition that is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the institution announced today.
The work in tempera on panel is one of 30 in the original series, Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954-56), which depicts watershed events dating in the early decades of the republic. The Met says that five of the 30 had been lost to history, and two of those were recorded only by their titles rather than with images, including the one that was just rediscovered.
A recent visitor to the Met’s exhibition who knew that an artwork by Lawrence had been in a neighbour’s collection for years suspected that the painting might belong to the Struggle series and urged the owners to contact the museum, the institution says. The owners wish to remain anonymous, it adds.
The newly discovered painting, titled There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786, depicts Shays’ Rebellion, an armed uprising by farmers in Massachusetts that helped to spur the writing of the US Constitution and moves to bolster federal power. In slashing forms in blue, black, yellow and sienna, it depicts opposing forces with bayonets.
The panel is No. 16 in the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, which originated at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and has been on view at the Met since it reopened to the public in late August. The show closes on 1 November.
The panel’s title quotes from a 1786 letter from the retired general George Washington, who expressed concern about “the conduct of the insurgents of Massachusetts” and “attendant disorders”. The rebellion was propelled by high state taxes and land foreclosures and was eventually put down in 1787.
Most of the paintings in the series are accompanied by a phrase or quotation based on Lawrence’s detailed research into the early years of a young American republic. Travelling from his home in Brooklyn to Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the artist delved into history books, letters, speeches, legal petitions and military reports in search of themes encapsulating the idea of anxious striving.
The exhibition catalogue notes that as Lawrence was beginning his Struggle series, the NAACP was preparing its landmark case against public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. “As Lawrence researched Shays’s Rebellion, the potential ‘spark’ of the Brown decision (1954) was literal,” the historian Kerri Greenidge writes. “The fire would emerge in black citizens’ nonviolent direct action in the face of violent white resistance to public school desegregation.”
The Met says There are combustibles had not been seen publicly since 1960, when the current owners purchased it at a local charity art auction. Its existence was first documented in a brochure released at the first showing of the Struggle series at the Alan Gallery in New York in 1956.
“It was our fervent hope that the missing panels would somehow surface during the run of American Struggle in New York, the city where Lawrence spent most of his life and where the series was last seen publicly,” says Randall Griffey, the Met curator in charge of the museum’s American wing who jointly organised the museum’s presentation of the exhibition. “Lawrence’s dynamic treatment of the 1786–87 Shays’ Rebellion reinforces the overall theme of the series—that democratic change is possible only through the actions of engaged citizens, an argument as timely today as it was when the artist produced his radical paintings in the mid-1950s.”
“It is rare to make a discovery of this significance in modern art, and it is thrilling that a local visitor is responsible,” says Max Hollein, the Met’s director. “We are also very excited for our colleagues at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), the organisers of the exhibition that inspired this historic find.”
The exhibition will also travel to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the Seattle Art Museum and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
