The epic in the ordinary

...Lawrence's white, and rural...

...For Michael cerally grasped Chicago's troubled race shadows behind her...

...Such visual narratives violate the taboo in a work that is sure to spark heated debate, Garry Wills takes an in much of modern American art against unflinching look at the recent history of the papacy and its ongoing depicting and finding moral meaning struggle to face the truth about itself, its past, and its relations with in arduous labor, fearful and uneasy others...

...History and story were powerful eleFrom Pulitzer Prize- g ments in the art of the '20s and '30s when Lawrence was a student at the author Garry Wills, a revelatory Utopia Children's Center in Harlem and later as a high school drop-out at the assessment of the modern papacy...

...even the poorest go to verture, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Reading his obituary in the the laundromat, in the United States, at Tubman...

...A retro- Church's continued denial of its actions during that time...

...Earlier efforts included multipiche artist Jacob Lawrence No one uses poles today...

...A small child, I watched as she family cowering in the corner of their stirred and lifted my father's work simple, wooden house as they consider clothes and my sister's diapers...

...Lawrence's caption out, a stable triangle, in a white coverall...

...57 accident of biography...

...no one slaves ture series on the lives of Toussaint L'Oudied in Seattle on June 9. over hot tubs...

...The woman or the standoffish attitude of Northern in Lawrence's painting was doing the blacks rendered by the looming figures laundry of another family, Southern, of a well-dressed couple...

...When I look at the viewer can see in the sixty pictures, when poster, I see her plowing and plunging they are gathered in one place (half are her pole, but I also see my mother...

...my gratitude lies in its demise...

...Race, region, and class separate counts the vast movement of Southern at the poster over my desk announcing the woman in the picture and my moth- rural blacks to the urban North after a 1992 exhibit of his work at the Phillips er, yet in my mind's eye, they are silent World War I. (The caption on 57 reads, Collection in Washington...

...The Migration of the Negro reNew York Times, I looked up least...

...Wills follows historical patterns of distortion and evasion, flight, suffering, hunger, courage, and "structures of deceit," and offers acute insight on such issues as: death...

...doing our family's laundry...

...Of course the consequences of flight-the cowerthere was a difference: my mother was ing captured by a flattened perspective...

...Against a background of gray, in the residue of a slave society...

...Celibacy: Why Pope Paul VI stifled discussion on the topic during the Second Vatican Council...

...among that number...

...known "old" world for the unknown, Commonweal 2 2 July 14, 2000 and not always welcoming, new one...

...Recall the WPA post office mural projects or the works of William Johnson, Diego Rivera, Ben Shahn, and Jean Charlot (some of whose drawings continue to appear in Commonweal...

...crowds in each picture, and concludes placed women poling their clothes in And it is true, as Kimmelman goes on with number 60, a solid band of travelers steaming, sudsy water...

...Jacob Lawrence worked throughout his long life (1917-2000) as an artist and teacher • We Remember: How a genuine effort to express sorrow over the (he was professor emeritus at the Univer- Holocaust in this recently released document was marred by the sity of Washington in Seattle...

...soon be installed in New York's Times Square subway station...

...Harlem Art Workshop...

...This image of deciclothes in stationary tubs in our base- sive movement alternates with others: a ment...

...His work is figurative, but it is not social realism-abstract forms and colors shape the figures depicted in The Migration of the Negro, figures traversing bleak Southern landscapes (poverty, segregation, exploitation, drought, lynchings) and eerie Northern cityscapes (jobs, housing, education, yes, but also discrimination, beatings, and riots...

...a black multipole...

...He certain- York," "St...

...My famishaped garments in the trough echo the perience, his work invites us to consid- ly was part of the great migration...

...It shows a sharers in this common labor...

...Yet these never fail to open the • Discrimination Against Women: The questionable reasoning mind and move the heart in the hands of behind current justifications for upholding ancient views of women a great artist...

...spective of his work is scheduled for the While Wills is critical of these and other matters, he also reminds us Phillips Collection in 2001, and a seventyof the positive potential of the Church by turning to some of the great two-foot-long mosaic that he designed will truth tellers, like Saint Augustine and John XXIII...

...F-1 ~~ ASelhle wherever books are sold A Sefecrian of the Bo Book~f-the-Month Club Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is Common- and the More Book Club  www.doubleday com weal's editor...

...with an appreciation of the ordinary-or The image of the train and train staWashing machines replaced the wash perhaps it is more accurate to say that tion recurs in the series with ever-larger tub and their mechanical agitators re- he appreciates the epic in the ordinary...

...half by New My sadness rises at the thought of York's Museum of Modem Art), the fearthis never-ending and backbreaking and hope-filled story of all who left the labor...

...left home and traveled to cities in the orange, gray, and black amorphous- Though his images are of the black ex- North in search of a better life...

...Seecolors of the abstract and rectangular er that this is, in many respects, every- ing this picture at the Phillips show, I visironing board, clothes hamper, and one's American experience...

...Jacob Lawrence was as inferior and ritually impure...

...His art valMargaret O'Brien Steinfels ues fairness and accuracy at the same time that it abstracts big subjects into precise symbols" (November 14, 1993...

...Lawrence belongs to the postHarlem Renaissance, post-WPA generation of painters...

...Commonweal 2 3 July 14, 2000...

...Hung together, the sixty compositions (each 18 x 12 inches, some vertical, some v horizontal), bring to mind other stories and other images: Stations of the Cross and the small pictures and portraits that make up large medieval altarpieces...

...The female worker was also one of the painting with the number fifty-seven Is my comparison inappropriate, an last groups to leave the South"-indeed, scrawled in the lower right corner...

...Lawrence's the stable shape of her white coverall andepicts a black woman, head bent, la- image, after all, is not of a Chicago chored by the red pole suggests she may boring over a large washing trough housewife, but a stark and simple ab- be there still...

...She is at once sor- Kimmelman, the New York Times art crit- relations at the time I was growing up in row and stability...

...tude wash over me as I gaze at her...

...Or is tude streams in diagonals toward train green, and black rectangles, an abstract Lawrence inviting us to meditate on all platforms marked "Chicago," "New rendering of wash hanging, she stands human want and suffering...

...Yellow, litical protest and racial advocacy...

...Sadness and grati- ic, Lawrence conveys "a sense of the epic the fifties...

...During World to note, that this allows Lawrence "to impatiently standing at the platform's War II, washing machines were forfeited edge, a horizontal band of form and to the war effort, however, and my moth- color anticipating the train that will er, like the woman on the poster, poled speed them away...

...paint horrific and momentous events without rant or pomposity...

...ly worked on a larger canvas (actually reads, "Around the time I was born, Her red washing pole, held straight up, gessoed masonite and tempera) than po- many African Americans from the South seems to anchor her in place...

...she was cheap black work is pointed but not tendentious...

...THE EPIC IN THE ORDINARY The picture of the laundress is desigThe painting of Jacob Lawrence nated 57 because it is fifty-seventh in a series of sixty paintings Lawrence created in 1941...

...In contrast, 1 in the series is pushing soaking clothes with a long stract painting of a black woman living all vitality and movement...

...owned by the Phillips...

...Louis...

...Any labor ready at hand...

...This story is never sentimental or merely engaging because Lawrence's compositional genius renders powerful emotions and searing r events not simply by visualizing them but evoking them...