Two missing paintings found in two weeks
Nurse discovers she had one of five panels long missing from Jacob Lawrence series
When a nurse living on the Upper West Side of New York City checked an app for neighborhood bulletins in the fall, she learned about the recent discovery of a Jacob Lawrence painting in an apartment a few blocks away. It had turned out to be one of five panels long missing from the artist’s groundbreaking 30-panel series “Struggle: From the History of the American People,” which was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, right across Central Park.
The name Jacob Lawrence rang a bell.
She walked over to look more closely at a small figurative painting on her dining room wall, where it had hung for two decades, its signature barely legible. It was a gift from her mother-in-law, who had taped a 1996 New York Times profile on Lawrence to the back. The nurse, who had only glanced at the back while dusting, learned from the app that Lawrence was a leading modernist painter of the 20th century — and one of the few Black artists of his time to gain broad recognition in the art world.
Could lightning strike twice in just two weeks’ time? The woman told the story to her 20-year-old son, who had studied art in college and quickly Googled the Met’s exhibition. He found a murky black-andwhite photograph of their very painting being used as a place holder for Panel 28. It was titled “Immigrants admitted from all countries: 1820 to 1840—115,773,” and the wall label read: “location unknown.”
“It didn’t look like anything special, honestly,” said the owner, who is in her late 40s and arrived in New York from Ukraine at 18. “The colors were pretty. It was a little bit worn. I passed by it on my way to the kitchen a thousand times a day,” she said in a phone interview.
“I didn’t know I had a masterpiece,” she added.
After she had connected the dots, she called the Met, but her messages went unreturned. By the third day, her son suggested they just head over on his motorbike. His mother recalled: “I grabbed a young kid at the information desk in the lobby and said, ‘Listen, nobody calls me back. I have this painting. Who do I need to talk to?’ ” Eventually, an administrator from the modern and contemporary art department met them downstairs and asked the owner to email her photos of the work — which she did on the spot, from her phone.
By that evening, Randall Griffey and Sylvia Yount, co-curators of the Met’s Lawrence show, and Isabelle Duvernois, the Met’s paintings conservator, were making their second trip to an Upper West Side apartment in the space of two weeks to verify the authenticity of a Lawrence painting that had not been seen publicly since 1960.
The nurse, who has agreed to lend her painting for the last two stops of the traveling exhibition, was granted anonymity because she said she was concerned for her family’s security living with a now-valuable artwork. The panel will debut March 5 at the Seattle Art Museum in “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” and remain on view through May 23.
Before the discovery of Panel 16, first reported by The New York Times on Oct. 21, the Met’s team had known only the work’s title and subject matter — Shays’ Rebellion — but had no image to help authenticate it. Griffey recalled the revelation of the first panel as “a great bright spot” for him professionally and for the pandemic-weary city. “It turned out to be the feel-good story of the season in need of feel-good stories,” he said.
With Panel 28, they had a low-quality photograph of the work, which had been exhibited in the late 1950s at the gallery of Lawrence’s dealer Charles Alan.
The painting, in vivid red, gold and brown tempera on hardboard, shows two women draped in shawls flanking a man in a broad-brimmed hat, their heads bowed and oversized hands clasped toward the center of the image. The panel, evoking old-world travelers, was inspired by immigration statistics in Richard Morris’ 1953 “Encyclopedia of American History,” part of Lawrence’s exhaustive research on the foundational contributions of immigrants, Blacks and Native Americans to the building of the nation. (He refers in the title to the number of immigrants who came to the United States during the early years of the 19th century.)
The “Struggle” series he executed from 1954-56 interweaves cubist forms in agitated compositions. It was a break with earlier work such as “The Migration Series” (1940-41), painted with simpler blocks of color.
While Panel 16, dominated by brilliant blues and in pristine condition, could join the traveling exhibition for its final days at the Met, Panel 28 had suffered flaking and lost paint and needed conservation to stabilize it. Griffey passed the baton to colleagues at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass..
“We think Lawrence unknowingly used some bad tubes of paint because there are certain colors, including red and brown, where the adhesive quality seems to be faulty across works produced in 1956,” said Lydia Gordon, coordinating curator of the exhibition at Peabody Essex. The museum collaborated with the Seattle Art Museum and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., to pay for treatment at Artcare Conservation in New York.