Is it chance or design that brings major exhibitions by Horace
Pippin and Jacob Lawrence to New York at more or less the same
time—the retrospective “I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin”
at the Metropolitan Museum
and “Jacob Lawrence: The Migration
Series” at the Museum of Modern Art?
(There’s no question about how or why the concurrent survey of
Lawrence’s work from 1936 to 1994 at Midtown Payson Galleries was
arranged, not that it wasn’t an excellent addition to the equation.)
From my experience of how institutions like the Met and MOMA work,
I suspect chance, although in many ways, the coincidence is
provocative enough, if only for the questions it raises, to have
warranted deliberate planning.

On the surface, there appear to be good reasons for putting
substantial groups of paintings by Pippin and Lawrence in close
proximity. They are both, after all, distinguished African-American
artists, albeit a generation and a half apart. (Pippin was born in
1888 and died in 1946; Lawrence was born in 1917.) Both were
represented in New York by the legendary Edith Halpert at the
Downtown Gallery, and in 1946 they were shown together, along with
Richmond Barthé, in a special exhibition, “Three Negro Artists,” at
the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington. Lawrence is quoted by
Judith E. Stein, the curator of the Pippin show, as saying that he
believes, in retrospect, that the older painter’s “content and his
form must have made some impression on me … Horace