Story Painter

The Life of Jacob Lawrence By John Duggleby

10 x 9-5/8 in; 64 pp ; Full color throughout, Ages 8-12
Hardcover
Published in October, 1998
ISBN 0811820823
ISBN13 9780811820820

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$16.99

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Reviews

Story Painter:
by John Duggleby

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
BOOKLIST
THE BULLETIN
THE HORN BOOK
KIRKUS REVIEWS
SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL
PARENTING MAGAZINE
HUNGRY MIND REVIEW

FROM: PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Duggleby once again enlarges upon themes in an American artist's life and work to create a gratifying portrait of a particular time and place. Lawrence's expressionistic, stark paintings, in excellent full-page color reproduction, together with an artful layout incorporating the artist's blocky color fields and rhythmic patterns, nicely complement Duggleby's measured account of a materially poor but culturally rich childhood and Lawrence's subsequent struggles and successes. The author subtly works in the effect of the dearth of materials during the Depression on Lawrence's emerging style as well as the artist's mission to convey the legacy of African Americans in his series paintings. The painter's links to the Harlem renaissance, the segregated military, civil rights and black pride movements are explored through anecdotes, photographs, paintings and opening quotes for each chapter, by such contemporaries as Langston Hughes, Fats Waller and Martin Luther King Jr. This solid work of biography/art history commemorates an extraordinary living artist and pays tribute to Lawrence's determination, optimism and originality.

FROM: BOOKLIST
By Hazel Rochman
This handsome biography, with 50 full-page color reproductions and lots of small photos, develops the theme of the artist's personal migration, beginning with his parents' move from the South and then the excitement of the boy Jacob, "Jake," when he moved to Harlem during the artistic Renaissance in the 1930s. Lawrence's tempera paintings will invite young people to look closely as they read about the artist's life and work, including his technique and the inspiration he found in the Mexican muralists. The presentation of Lawrence's historical subjects—Touissaint-Louverture, the Underground Railroad, migration, civil rights, and more—will stimulate group discussion about the African American experience and also about "everyone's search for a better life."

FROM: THE BULLETIN
of The Center for Children's Books
University of Illinois
Lawrence is one of the most significant American painters of the century, and Duggleby traces his life from his family's move north in the Great Migration to his formative years in Harlem and his professional life as a struggling and then successful artist. The book is particularly good at capably conveying the complicated relationship of Lawrence's art and his African-American culture, including his desire to be an artist whose merit was recognized not just within racial lines and the resentment of some African Americans at Lawrence's absence of political action. There's an inviting look to the book... with its pages in a collection of colors, its incorporated design motifs, and its scrapbooky setting of photographs, that lends it a casual accessibility. Readers who found Lawrence's The Great Migration or Walter Dean Myers' Toussaint L'Ouverture memorable will find this a useful way to become more acquainted with a great American artist.

FROM: THE HORN BOOK
By Deborah Taylor
Here is a visually striking, well-researched biography of one of the premier African-American artists of the contemporary era. Duggleby recounts the story of Jacob Lawrence's life: his birth in 1917 to parents who had left the South for a better life in the North; his enrollment in an after school program at Utopia's Children's House in Harlem, where he met his first art teacher, Charles Alston, and began to hear stories about the roles African Americans played in history; his decision to paint those historical stories; his innovation of series paintings such as the Toussaint L'Ouverture series, the Great Migration series, and the Harriet Tubman series—all stories he felt were too big for one painting. The use of Lawrence's paintings both to illustrate significant points in his life as well as to show his artistic accomplishment adds a great deal to a text that is readable and informative.

FROM: KIRKUS REVIEWS
With the same care that he lavished on his biography of Grant Wood (Artist in Overalls, 1996), Duggleby shows how the vibrant, textured paintings of Jacob Lawrence "symbolized the search for a better life by people of all races throughout history." The language Duggleby uses is straightforward but evocative, often allowing the paintings to "speak" for themselves. Young readers will come away not only with a sense of the life of Lawrence, but with a sense of how artists convey meaning with images instead of words.

FROM: SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL
A thoughtful, accessible account of the life of one of the pioneers of 20th-century American art. Beginning with Lawrence's birth in 1917, the book touches on the pivotal events of his life and career. The difficulties he has faced as an African American striving to succeed in a white-dominated field are dealt with adeptly. Duggleby frequently describes the artist's paintings and the influences that led to their creation as a way of allowing readers to see into Lawrence's world through his own artwork.

FROM: PARENTING MAGAZINE
By Leonard S. Marcus
For much of his long, trailblazing career, painter Jacob Lawrence had to struggle not only with art-making but with racial prejudice. The African-American artist's powerful impages of ordinary people going about their lives, often against great odds, pack an emotional wallop while telling compelling stories of history. This copiously illustrated biography—the first about Lawrence for yound readers—reveals the artist's own heroic persistence. A

FROM: HUNGRY MIND REVIEW
By Emily Bloch
Duggleby manages to simplify in all the right ways, focusing on the details that kids would find interesting and imitting the ones they wouldn't. He follows Lawrence through his childhood in Philadelphia and adolescence in New York, adding delightful descriptions of his environment—the pork scrapple his mother prepared for him, the overwhelming height of apartment buildings in Manhattan, and characters such as Fats Waller and the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. from the Harlem Renaissance.

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