Although he spent nearly all of his professional life in the public eye, Jacob Lawrence has remained an elusive figure. A child of the Harlem Renaissance, Lawrence was born too late to be more than a perceptive eyewitness to that movement. A figurative artist whose small-scale paintings were driven by historical narratives, the artist reached maturity in an era that preferred grand, mute abstractions. Socially engaged but reticent to protest, a critical darling well removed from the centrism of his native New York, a regular in the commercial galleries, a bolsterer of thematic exhibitions, and the subject of several strong but narrowly focused museum shows, Lawrence has been assessed in many contexts but has eluded the big picture. When he died at age 82 on June 9, 2000, Ellen Wheat’s Jacob Lawrence: American Painter (1986) remained the only major museum retrospective that included a significant catalogue.

Part of the problem was the artist himself. By all accounts a modest, generous and thoughtful man, Lawrence struggled emotionally with the success he achieved so early and so easily. His first major cycle of paintings, forty-one panels describing The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, appeared in an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939 when Lawrence was only twenty-one years old. Two years and three series of paintings later, Lawrence’s sixty-panel The Migration of the Negro was featured in the magazine Fortune. A month after that he became the first African American artist to enter the retinue of Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in Manhattan. Still only twenty-four years old, the artist was a star.

World War II scarcely interrupted Lawrence’s rise, and, even while serving on a Coast Guard weather patrol boat, he continued to paint and exhibit his work. With his discharge from the military, one professional success quickly stepped on the heels of the next. It all came so quickly that Lawrence found it increasingly difficult to believe that he deserved the recognition, that he, among so many, should enjoy such privilege. Coping with his achievements and the responsibilities they carried became the stuff of his daily struggle. In July 1949, Lawrence walked into Hillside Hospital in Queens, seeking treatment for depression. He stayed in the facility for four months, came home for the holidays, then checked himself back in on January 16, 1950, remaining for seven months.

The experience of mental health care did not so much humble Lawrence—humility was far nearer the cause than the cure of his illness—as it provided emotional, psychological, and aesthetic perspective. That perspective, however, may have failed him professionally. Lawrence passed on opportunities to self-promote that other artists would have seized eagerly. He declined to be a spokesperson for his aesthetic, his generation, or his race. In the late 1960s, he quite legitimately could have called himself the precursor of the protest and civil rights generations that were then gaining broad international attention; instead, Lawrence moved quietly to Seattle to teach at the University of Washington. He remained there for the rest of his life, a painter and a professor, accepting his share of successes, teaching his students, and allowing the rest to fall where it may.

Just months after Lawrence passed away, Peter T. Nesbett’s and Michelle DuBois’s much anticipated Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999): A Catalogue Raisonné and Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, a companion volume of essays by eight senior academics, curators, and conservators, were published by the University of Washington Press. Seeking to compensate for the slender body of literature devoted to Lawrence, to offer reliable color illustrations of the artist’s work, and to present the first comprehensive overview of Lawrence’s career, the two volumes largely succeed on all counts.

Nesbett’s and DuBois’s catalogue volume, produced with the assistance of Stephanie Ellis-Smith, is nearly everything a catalogue raisonné should be. Each painting, drawing, and mural has been meticulously researched, with its provenance, exhibition history, publication references, and captions all thoroughly documented. Perhaps one-eighth of the entries contain brief remarks, usually no more than a few lines, but offer such useful information as alternative titles and, in one case (P38-09), doubts expressed by the artist himself as to a painting’s authenticity. The entries are refreshingly free of too many cryptic abbreviations and errors of internal logic (such as a drawing exhibited the year before it was executed, a ridiculous but common error in catalogues raisonnés). John Hubbard’s design is elegant and generous, and virtually every work located—including many of the drawings in black and white—has been reproduced in color. The volume ends with an extensive and readable exhibition history and bibliography.

Any study of Jacob Lawrence’s life and work must account for the precocious sophistication of his early art. At a tender stage in life, when even the most gifted painter usually is culling his or her way through the history of art, Lawrence was already honing the mature aesthetic that would serve him for more than sixty years. Thematically inventive, conceptually bold, and more advanced technically than most observers realize, the nineteen-year-old Lawrence flashed onto the Harlem art scene with such seeming self-assurance that it is nearly impossible now not to ponder how he could have arrived so developed beyond his years.

The question certainly fascinated the authors of Over the Line: The Life and Work of Jacob Lawrence. The book’s first three essays, by Leslie King-Hammond, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, and Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, all contend with the artist’s preternatural origins. King-Hammond cogently summarizes the cultural and social phenomenon that produced the working class Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s, examining the contrast it offered to the affluent, mainstream art world of downtown New York. Avoiding the romantic lens that has so often pictured Harlem as both less and more than it really was (and is), King-Hammond skirts the neighborhood’s famous theaters and nightlife for a clearer view of the single parenthood, gender politics, and community centers that played a far more profound role in shaping Lawrence’s early development.

In her description and analysis of Lawrence’s much underestimated education, Elizabeth Hutton Turner picks up the thread in Harlem and ably refutes the portrait of the artist as little more than a talented naif. Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins’s consideration of the critical reception of Lawrence’s early work falters somewhat in its dependence on lengthy quotations, but it completes a compelling introduction to the artist’s first years as a professional artist. Questions remain, but in accounting for Lawrence’s innovative imagery (of Harlem), his distinctive style (encouraging educators), and the reaction of his various publics, the book’s first three essays go some distance in clarifying the artist’s early rise to prominence.

Richard J. Powell examines Lawrence’s career at midcentury—a period of enflamed political and aesthetic debate and a moment of personal crisis for the artist. Powell’s intriguing discussion is followed by Patricia Hills’s consideration of Lawrence during the protest years of the 1960s. Given that the artist never shied from social commentary in his art, Lawrence’s public support of the civil rights movement and other social issues proves surprisingly complex. Lowery Stokes Sims provides one of the book’s strongest essays in her consideration of Lawrence’s “builders paintings,” a touchstone subject the artist revisited frequently over a forty-five year span. In sorting out the often competing influences of “Modernism, Race and Community” on Lawrence’s art, Paul J. Karlstrom, like Sims, delivers welcome breadth to a book whose investigations are intentionally and at times relentlessly narrow in scope. The concluding essay by Elizabeth Steele, a conservator at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, offers a useful assessment of Lawrence’s materials and techniques. My one significant criticism of this volume is that there are too many brief essays, where fewer, broader, and deeper analyses would have better served the artist, the publication, and future scholars; each of these talented writers seems to have more to say.

Working closely with an esteemed, aging artist can be a seductive and daunting experience. In these two welcome volumes, the authors have subjugated their clear admiration for Lawrence in order to provide an accurate historical narrative and an authoritative catalogue of his works. Their relative objectivity now permits a broader understanding and recognition of Lawrence’s considerable achievement. Jacob Lawrence lived to see galleys of this handsome publication. I hope that he was pleased.