The First Book of Moses, called Genesis. The King James Version

New York: The Limited Editions Club. Printed by Heritage Printers on Cartiere Enrico Magnani paper; silkscreens printed by George Drexel at Osiris Printing on Whatman paper, 1989. Imperial folio. (21 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches). First edition. Numbered 18 of 400 copies. Signed by the artist in pencil on the colophon. With 8 original color silkscreens. Plate marks: (19 1/4 x 14 inches). Sheet sizes: (21 1/2 x 16 inches). Bound in full midnight blue Japanese cotton with gilt lettering, within a suede-lined dark blue clamshell box with gilt stamp label

A signed epic production of the Book of Genesis with eight striking silk-screen illustrations by the seminal American painter of the Black experience, Jacob Lawrence.

Each of these eight Jacob Lawrence prints describes a passage from the Book of Genesis in the King James version of the Bible. As Lawrence explained, "My inspiration came from memories of the preachers at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, the Church in which I was baptized and which I faithfully attended in my youth." The main preacher who inspired Lawrence was the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., the father of the famous congressman and Civil Rights leader Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. The color prints in Genesis exemplify the unity and visual eloquence characteristic of his work. Lawrence used bold colors, simplified forms, narrative storytelling, and dynamic compositions, to convey a sense of movement and energy that brought the viewer into his world. Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during WWI and his family then moved to Harlem; the vibrant New York neighborhood later became an inspiration for his work. At a young age Lawrence began drawing and painting, and his talent was recognized while he was still a teenager. In 1937, he received a scholarship to attend the American Artists School in New York. Lawrence's canonical work The Migration Series was created between 1940 and '41 and comprises 60 small paintings that portray the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the early twentieth century. The series crystallizes the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the Great Migration, a transformative period in American history. According to the publisher, between 17 and 21 screens were required to print the colors for each of the eight illustrations in Genesis, a total of approximately 140 separate stencils, all of which were destroyed after the strictly limited number of 400 original sets of prints were achieved. In Genesis, a biblical book about the beginning of human history, Lawrence found the beauty and struggle of Black life in the American century.

Limited Editions Club Newsletter, Number 558, May 1990.