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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 8
Lesson 8: Harlem RenaissanceA Harlem street scene by Jacob Lawrence, Ambulance Call
Jacob Lawrence's painting 'Ambulance Call' portrays a Harlem community in 1948, gathered around a medical emergency. The abstract, geometric figures express a sense of grief and unity. The painting reflects the discrimination in healthcare during that era, highlighting the progress of African-Americans in the medical field.
Want to join the conversation?
- How comes that the picture are not very clear and i would like to comprehend more information on really security and intelligence issue if at all the information is available ?(2 votes)
- You can see more of Jacob Lawrence's art by doing a Google search for "Jacob Lawrence Art" and then asking to see the images. It's amazing stuff.(1 vote)
- Did anyone notice the cat across the fence with a mouse in it’s mouth? Does the cat mean anything? Or is that a background character?(1 vote)
- It could be symbolic of something, or just something horizontal to fill an empty space in a painting that is mainly vertical in orientation.(3 votes)
- The upper blue ambulance attendant has what appears to be an outline of the state of New York on his/ her jersey. Has anyone else seen this? Any significance?(2 votes)
- Why did Kahn chose these specific paintings to talk about?(1 vote)
- Khan (Sal Khan) didn't choose these, the good folks at www.smarthistory.org who made most of the videos here, did. Go over to smarthistory and see if you can find why.(2 votes)
- Is the background at sunset and are they outside or is that just a random color that Laurence used??(1 vote)
Video transcript
(gentle piano music) - [Narrator] We're in the galleries at the Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art looking at a painting by Jacob Lawrence called Ambulance Call
and it dates to 1948. And here we are as we often
are with Jacob Lawrence, on the streets of Harlem. Lawrence had depicted a medical emergency. We have two ambulance
attendants dressed in blue hauling a patient on a stretcher. And to the side we see a paramedic with a stethoscope
peeking out of his pocket. This may be a street scene in Harlem but we don't see the city
or the street itself. We just see this community
gathering together around the figure on the stretcher. The figures are close together and you'll get a patterning
of their vibrant clothing. It emphasizes that sense of community. And the figures, like in
so much of Lawrence's work, are rendered in a very abstract way. Bodies form these geometric shapes and yet they're still so expressive. When I look, for example, at the figure in red with the pearls and that wonderful belt, the way that she pulls her
right arm across her body, her head sinks down below her shoulders. We have a real sense of grief. You also get people from
different backgrounds. We see in the upper right, a
gentleman wearing overalls. Lawrence does draw our
attention to little moments. So we have the figure on the right who's got a cigarette in his
hand and is stepping forward. Or the figure in front of
him is a little bit shorter wearing that wonderful straw hat. Some people wearing top
hats, some wearing berets, some wearing baseball caps. All of the faces are turned
down toward this figure and yet he looks up with his mouth open and it's incredibly poignant. The downcast faces of the figures and their somber expressions indicate that this is
a very dire situation. Harlem in the 1940s, this is the tail end of
the Harlem Renaissance, this incredible flowering of the arts beginning in the 1920s,
lasting through the 1940s. Also the period of The Great Migration where huge numbers of
African-Americans migrated from the South to Harlem. Harlem became the center
of African-American culture and there's this vitality
in the streets of Harlem that Lawrence captures so well. This is a wonderful opportunity to think about African-Americans
in the medical field. Harlem Hospital was the
neighborhood hospital. The hospital had been built in 1887 and over time as an increasing
number of African-Americans moved to the neighborhood, the need for greater capacity
continued to increase but due to systemic racism the medical care that was
necessary for the community always lagged behind. It's important to remember
that this a period of intense discrimination
in New York City. We often think about the
problems in the Jim Crow South during this period before
the Civil Rights Movement, but discrimination was
rampant in New York City. People of color got
second-rate medical care. There were very few Black doctors and Harlem Hospital didn't
get its first Black doctor until 1919. And you get a sense of that advancement of African-Americans in the medical field in thinking about the fact
that the attendants here and the paramedic are African-American. It's a incredibly moving painting and I just wanted to read this
quote from Lawrence himself about Harlem. He said, "It was a very
cohesive community. "You knew people. "You didn't know their names, "but you'd pass people on the street "and see the faces over and over again. "It was that kind of community. "You knew the police,
you knew the firemen, "you knew the teachers,
the people on the street. "You knew the peddlers. "That's what it was for me." And you do get that sense of
people who know one another, if not intimately, they're
familiar with one another here in this painting. One little sense I do
get of the street scene is the cat at the top with
some prey in its mouth as though we're both looking
down at the ambulance scene, but maybe up at a rooftop. I wonder if Lawrence meant it as a comment on the sick figure that
cat has come for its prey, the way that perhaps death
has come for the figure on the stretcher. And you have this dramatic
human experience playing out in the center, and then the sense that life continues on and there's the whole other
cycle of life and death that carries on in the background. (upbeat music)