JO Munich / München 1972 Jacob Lawrence - Open Edition

Jacob Lawrence was the natural choice for a relay race. The artist who spent decades painting collective struggle, collective movement, the passing of something precious from hand to hand — the baton here is not just a baton. His runners surge around the track in a swirl of flat colour and angular limb, viewed from above as if the gods were watching, their bodies rendered in the bold, patterned shapes he had perfected across forty years of depicting African American life with unflinching grace.

Lawrence brought to Munich what no European artist in the series could: the authority of an artist for whom athletes in motion were also a statement about who gets to occupy the world stage. The composition pulls the eye into a centrifugal spiral, five runners mid-exchange, the baton already mid-flight — frozen at the precise moment when everything depends on the next pair of hands. It is one of the most narratively charged images in the entire Munich programme.

This piece is sold unframed, carefully rolled and shipped in a rigid tube to ensure it arrives in pristine condition.