4 All other sources of labor having been exhausted, the migrants were the last resource.
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Curatorial Comparison
The dignity of the worker is a theme that resonates throughout Lawrence’s work, from The Migration Series to his Builder series. Like the Mexican muralists, whose “pure, bold color and big forms” [1] he greatly admired, Lawrence remained committed to presenting humanistic subject matter in a direct, accessible style.
“The human subject is the most important thing,” Lawrence said, adding, “My work is abstract in the sense of having been designed and composed, but it is not abstract in the sense of having no human content… . [I] want to communicate. I want the idea to strike right away.” [2] Not only were examples of murals by José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) readily accessible in New York on the walls of the New School for Social Research, but in 1940, Lawrence had the great privilege of meeting the artist while he was working on his Dive Bomber and Tank mural for the Museum of Modern Art. While too young at the time to make frescoes himself since he was not eligible for the WPA mural project, Lawrence nevertheless instilled a mural-like power and scope into such multipanel narratives as The Migration Series.
[1] Carroll Greene, Jr., unpublished interview with Jacob Lawrence, Washington, DC: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, October 26, 1968), 15.
[2] Elizabeth McCausland, “Jacob Lawrence,” Magazine of Art, 38 (November 1945), 251.