Best known for his famous Migration series (1940-41), Jacob Lawrence dedicated his career to telling the stories of African Americans; addressing poverty, racism, and other forms of injustice; and celebrating the culture and resilience of black communities in the United States. Lawrence came of age in Harlem during the Great Depression, where he met prominent African American artists and intellectuals, and this experience had a profound effect on his choice of subject matter. Harlem was equally important to Lawrence's visual style and the vibrant energy conveyed in his paintings. Inspired by the formal properties of African art, the bright colors decorating the walls of Harlem apartments, and the history of African Americans in the United States, Lawrence developed a distinctive style of narrative painting featuring a flattened picture plane and boldly colored figures.

Our featured painting, Rain (1938), brings together central aspects of Lawrence's earlier style. The convergence in Depression-era Harlem of dire poverty and vibrant culture is palpable in Rain, where an irrepressible, distinctly urban energy exists beneath the muted tones that comprise the scene. Painted on paperboard with tempera, the medium he could best afford at the time, Rain is a series of stops, flows, and colliding perspectives. The even, diagonal streaks of rain fall in ordered lines, providing an overall visual rhythm that evokes the monotonous patter of a steady rainfall. But while the rain falls in one direction, the sidewalk, curb, and subway station push against the flow of water, emphasizing the struggle of the man with the pushcart and giving us a sense of the strength needed to push his heavy load. The other figures in the painting tend to everyday tasks. One hurries a child up the street, an action echoed in the way the girl drags her scarf behind her. Another rushes the day's groceries across the bottom of the painting, while a third ties a girl's rain bonnet, her back temporarily turned to the other child. Both girls carry sacks of oranges, which, although burdensome, provide a bright spot of color similar to the green associated with the other figures. In Rain, Lawrence demonstrates his preference for dynamic composition over a realistic rendering of space. The building on the right halts the flow of the curb, and it seems to both recede and push outward. Space pulls forward, pushes back, becomes compressed and attenuated. Bodies are likewise stretched and flattened. Lawrence's treatment of figures and space reveals his multiple influences, which include traditional African art, modernist painting, and urban living. While the grays, blues, and earth tones lend a sense of misty calm, the clashing diagonals, impossible spatial arrangements, and figures moving in all sorts of directions remind us of the hurried pace of daily life - the work to be done, the food to be cooked, the children to be cared for. Lawrence paints the scene with affection and endows it with a kind of vitality that enables us to see the extraordinary beauty of an ordinary rainy day.