Bar-b-que

Jacob Lawrence’s Bar-b-que presents a populated city street, focusing on the façade of a barbeque restaurant where a chef prepares slabs of flaming meat and diners sit in the narrow recess of the restaurant’s interior. Two passersby appear immune to the lure of the surrounding sights and smells, while three adults and a lone child stand transfixed on the sidewalk before the open kitchen, perhaps waiting in line to order the succulent pork ribs or roasted chicken.

Lawrence was an important American painter of the twentieth century whose works, frequently created in series using tempera or gouache on paper or cardboard, portray scenes of Black life and history with vivid stylized realism. He created this scene to reflect daily life in 1940s Harlem where he lived. Bar-b-que contains multiple vignettes in one composition and can be read in and out of its windows and doors to convey the complex layered activities that are central to its subjects: the interior of the restaurant populated by patrons and a cook, the central chef in the open kitchen facing the street, the individuals in the foreground on the sidewalk, and the three windows that hint at apartments above. Lawrence's storefront brings a new perspective to urban genre painting.

Following a trip to the South, where he documented poverty and racial segregation in New Orleans and rural Virginia, Lawrence returned to Harlem in 1942 and began a new year-long painting campaign. He produced a thematic group of paintings depicting everyday experiences in Harlem, marked by rich individual compositions and endowed with a new range of bold color designs and spatial geometries. Bar-b-que is among the earliest paintings on this subject and embodies a new synthesis in which the selection and juxtaposition of objects—syncopated geometries of doors, windows, bricks—reference the familiar sights of the Harlem community in Lawrence’s stylized, modernist vision of the world.

Bar-b-que was first exhibited at Downtown Gallery’s Spring Exhibition held in 1943. One month later, thirty of Lawrence’s recent Harlem paintings were presented as a group at Downtown Gallery. Bar-b-que was not included in that show, indicating that Lawrence conceived of this work as a complete statement and not as part of a set of captioned narrative paintings like his earlier series such as The Migration of the Negro (1940–41).

[Spring Exhibition]. Downtown Gallery, New York, New York,  March 31‒April 24, 1943.

America: Painting a Nation,  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (organizers). Venue: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, November 9, 2013–February 8, 2014. [exh. cat.]

“The Color Line" African-American Artists and civil rights in the United States , Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France (organizers). Venue: Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France, October 4, 2016–January 15, 2017.  [exh. cat.]

Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945 Art Institute of Chicago and Terra Foundation for American Art (organizers). Venue:  Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, China, September 28, 2018–January 6, 2019.   [exh. cat.]
 
Jacob Lawrence: African American Modernist Kunsthal KAdE (organizer). Venue: Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, The Netherlands, September 27, 2025–January 4, 2026.

Nesbett, Peter T. and Michelle DuBois. Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings and Murals (1935-1999): A Catalogue Raisonné. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Text p. 68, cat. no. 42–16, ill. pl. 42–16 (color).

America: Painting a Nation. (exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Museum of Korea, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art). Sydney, Australia: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2013. Text pp. 27, 37, 216; ill. p. 217, cat. no. 76 (color).

Soutif, Daniel.  The Color Line: Les Artistes Africains-Américains et la Ségrégation 1865–2016. (exh. cat. Musée du quai Branly). Paris:  Flammiron, 2016. ill. p. 315 (color).

Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945. (exh. cat. Shanghai Museum with Art Institute of Chicago and Terra Foundation for American Art). Shanghai: Shanghai Museum, 2018. Text p. 158; ill. p. 159 (color).

Bourguignon, Katherine M., and Peter John Brownlee, eds. Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2018. Text pp. 230, 231; ill. p. 230, detail pp. 232–233 (color).