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• 1 media/LL BG.png media/LL BG.png 2024-10-20T10:29:00-07:00 Lawrence's L'Ouverture 55 Lawrence’s L’Ouverture combines intimate scenes from Toussaint’s life with his leadership of the Haitian people, revealing the depth and complexity of the man and demonstrating that he was no mere anomaly in history. image_header 2024-12-18T07:15:23-08:00

  I am sure much of what they said was romanticized but that didn’t matter. What mattered was to have something to be proud of, something to look up to.             

  Jacob Lawrence Interview w/ Phillips Collection

  
  In 1938, at just twenty years old, Jacob Lawrence created a series of forty-one paintings depicting the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture. While already a big hit in his own time, this wasn't the end of the story for Lawrence's Toussaint. The painting series continued to spark discussion amongst many art lovers, the leaders of the Black Power movement [1], and even children through the publication of picture books [3]. Nearly fifty years later, Lawrence would bring the series back as a series of silkscreen prints produced in collaboration with printmaker Lou Stovall. The fifteen screen prints of select works from the original series remind us that the fight against white supremacy and Western imperialism in America is far from over and that L'Ouverture's work is far from finished. 
  
  But this isn't to say that Toussaint L'Overture's image is as clean as Lawrence makes it seem. Like the signature flat, bold style of his painting, Lawrence simplifies L'Ouverture into a figure synonymous with only one word: resistance. [4] In reality, L'Ouverture has been as controversial as he is celebrated. [5] Lawrence doesn't show Lawrence's tolerance of his former enslavers, or his return to the plantation system that had gripped Haiti so soon after its liberation, as can be seen in the [Special Collections] comic book on display in our exhibit. Today, it is important that when we praise L'Ouverture as a hero, we do so consciously, acknowledging his faults alongside his victories.
  
  
  
  
• 1 media/Contemplation.jpg 2024-11-06T13:04:41-08:00 Contemplation 27 plain 2024-12-18T07:45:07-08:00
  Left: Returning to private life as the commander and chief of the army, he saw to it that the country was well taken care of, and Haiti returned to prosperity. During this important period, slavery was abolished, and attention focused upon agricultural pursuits (1937) / Right: Contemplation (1993)

  In Contemplation (1993), Lawrence pays homage to Toussaint L’Ouverture’s study of Enlightenment philosophy. Although L'Ouverture grew up in slavery, his masters allowed him to learn to read and write. Later, his engagement with Catholic teachings and Enlightenment political philosophers, like John Locke and Jean Jacques-Rousseau, inspired his revolutionary aspirations. Through Contemplation (1993), Lawrence takes care to show the intellectual and philosophical dimensions of L'Ouverture’s fight for liberation. L’Ouverture sits alone in a colorful room, illuminated by candlelight. He wears his military uniform, suggesting a connection between his intellectual explorations and the Haitian Revolution. The room’s window is boarded shut, showing a barrier between L’Ouverture and the rest of this world in this moment of quiet contemplative study.