NEW YORK —The Metropolitan Museum’s celebrated exhibition “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” has drawn many visitors, but recently one of them had a revelation: She …
NEW YORK —The Metropolitan Museum’s celebrated exhibition “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” has drawn many visitors, but recently one of them had a revelation: She suspected that one of five panels missing from the artist’s original series of 30 reexamining the nation’s early history had been hanging in her neighbors’ Upper West Side apartment for decades. She returned home and encouraged them to contact the museum. The neighbors had purchased the small painting by the renowned Black artist for a very modest sum at a friend’s Christmas charity art auction in 1960, to benefit a music school. They are an elderly couple and asked the Met and The New York Times that they not be identified to protect their privacy. They are not art collectors; they had only become aware that their painting of confrontation between soldiers and farmers in Revolutionary War times might possibly be part of a larger series when they read stories about the Lawrence exhibition premiering earlier this year at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the curators’ efforts to locate the lost works. Last week, the couple finally contacted an art adviser to help them navigate the Met, one of the country’s largest museums. On Wednesday, their painting — Lawrence’s Panel 16 from his series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” — was hung at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reunited with the rest of the known works for the remaining two weeks of the exhibition, through Nov.1. On view starting Thursday, it will travel on loan to venues in Birmingham, Alabama, Seattle and Washington, D.C., through next fall. “The painting has been hanging in my living room for 60 years untouched,” one of the painting’s owners said, adding that she bought it with her husband when she was 27. She said the pair had initially put off contacting the Peabody Museum early in the year because they were traveling to Florida. A child of immigrants, the owner said she grew up in the South Bronx and studied Latin and art appreciation — her daughter and granddaughter are both artists. She said she has always loved Lawrence’s work and is happy to share it. “Last week a friend of mine went to the show and said, ‘There’s a blank spot on the wall and I believe that’s where your painting belongs,’ ” she continued.
