Jacob Lawrence and Philip Guston: Painting American Epic
Dr Saul Nelson, University of Cambridge
Wednesday 20 May 2026, 4.15 – 6.30pm
Lecture Room 1, Arts Building, University of Birmingham.
Drinks reception 5.30 – 6.30pm in the Mason Lounge, Arts Building, University of Birmingham.
Open to students, staff and public. Free to attend.
The American painters Jacob Lawrence (1917 – 2000) and Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) are never compared to each other. This is in spite of the fact that, besides making some of the finest figurative modernist painting of the 20th Century, they dealt with similar themes: history, racial identity, the narrative possibilities of painting, mental illness, and the decline of the public sphere to name a few.
Race plays a part in this division, as does style. Lawrence’s interest in a kind of (complex, contradictory, often thwarted) social documentation, as well as his blackness, have marked him off from the ‘mainstream’ of modern American painting in which Guston participated (however intermittently and agonisedly).
In this paper Dr Nelson moves against this tendency by comparing Lawrence and Guston’s approaches to rendering what might be called epic history: historical narratives of violence, heroism, and masculinity. In particular, Dr Nelson follows a trope in both of their art in which fighters are shown locked in futile combat: the kind of mortal encounter in which combatants strike blindly at each other with no clear possibility of either walking away unharmed.
Dr Nelson link this topos to a specific reading of American history as locked in repeated cycles of civil violence, rather than progressing towards eventual resolution – a reading that connects to the contested status of race in the US and the decline of the kinds of organised left wing class politics with which Guston and Lawrence both sympathised in their youth.
About the speaker:
Saul Nelson is a Junior Research Fellow and Teaching Associate in History of Art at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. His research and teaching explore two key questions: How did modernist painting fracture and shift over the course of the twentieth century in response to new historical and political demands, pre-eminently for decolonisation, as well as racial and gender equality? and how did contemporary painting develop from these fractures? His first book, Never Ending: Modernist Painting Past and Future, was published by Yale University Press in 2024. His writing has appeared in Art History, American Art, Oxford Art Journal, New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and The London Review of Books.
This research seminar is hosted by the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham.