Sandra K. Friday
Then I will show them a slide of Jacob Lawrence’s
Confrontation at the Bridge
and ask them to substitute this painting for Church’s landscape. They will again identify objects, possible symbols, people; then they will name colors, hues and tones; and finally they will talk about the composition of the painting.
Confrontation at the Bridge
was the painting Lawrence created when he was commissioned to do a painting to celebrate the American Bicentennial. When students learn this, they might brainstorm why they think he chose to feature Civil Rights demonstrators, led by Martin Luther King, being confronted by Commissioner “Bull” Connor and members of his police force with bayonets and attack dogs as they attempted to cross a bridge into Birmingham, Alabama. Students will be asked to speculate on why Lawrence has chosen to freeze this historical event in the moment prior to the violence. Viewers cannot help but anticipate what is to come.
I will ask my students, “If you were to step over the rope into this painting, where would you stand? Which one are you? Are you the man in the gold shirt and blue bib overalls, spearheading the protestors, facing off the guard dogs and bayonets, or are you somewhere in the middle, insulated from immediate harm by those around you?” Perhaps you are off to the side, not actually visible in the painting. Once on the bridge, one can only wonder what it must have felt like to be among these demonstrators. What sounds would they hear? What would they see coming at them from the other side? Did they stand their ground? (This seems like a natural opportunity for students to research this historic event on the computers in the classroom and bring back their findings.) Even the black and white clouds, some tinged with red, are menacing and pointed, reinforcing the threat from the bayonets. And, as if this overhanging menace weren’t enough, there is in the composition of the painting a technique called
doubling
, in which the shapes and colors, including symbolic red, in the clouds are reflected in the water under the bridge, enhancing the anticipated danger.
It has been suggested that Lawrence took part of his inspiration for
Confrontation at the
Bridge
from Claude McKay’s poem
If We Must Die
. McKay’s line, “While around us bark the mad and hungry dogs,” 2 shows up in the bared teeth of the dogs, clouds and bayonets in the painting. Of course, “stepping into
this
painting” compels us to investigate what happened there on that bridge just outside Birmingham, and to make a judgment as to whether and/or how Lawrence captured it. Jacob Lawrence painted over 900 paintings in his lifetime, and before he died, in 2000 at the age of 82, it is fair to say, considering that poets change, by the end of their lives, into the words in their poems, he had changed into the brush strokes in his art. (Lesson plan # 2 focuses on
Confrontation at the Bridge
.)
To experience up close just what the narrator in Collins’s poem is doing when he steps over the soft, velvet rope and meanders through the landscape, students could take a field trip to the Yale University Art Gallery to view and step over the velvet rope into Church’s
Mt Ktaadn,
or step into the even more massive painting,
Yosemite Valley,
Glacier Point Trail,
by Albert Bierstadt.