Artist

Norman Lewis

born New York City 1909-died New York City 1979
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Norman Lewis, © Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum J0001863
Also known as
  • Norman Wilfred Lewis
Born
New York, New York, United States
Died
New York, New York, United States
Biography

New York-born Lewis began his career during the 1930s as a social realist. He shifted from an overtly figural style, depicting bread lines, evictions, and police brutality, to non-objective abstraction in the 1950s, but remained active and consciously aware of social inequities, particularly those faced by African Americans.

Gwen Everett African American Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C. and New York: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003)

Artist Biography

During the mid-1940s New York painter Norman Lewis abandoned the social realist style that he had pursued for more than a decade, having decided that painting "an illustrative statement that merely mirrors some of the social conditions" was not an effective agent for change. Around 1946 he began exploring an overall, gestural approach to abstraction, establishing himself as the only African American among the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists.

Inspired by sources as diverse as music, nature, Chinese, Japanese, and African art, and modern painters from Wassily Kandinsky to Mark Tobey, Lewis freely experimented with varying approaches to abstraction. Although representational associations had diminished as his point of departure by the early 1960s, his mature works such as Evening Rendezvous [SAAM, 1994.32] nonetheless combine a haunting sense of figurative presence and the immaterial. Here, a rhythmic tracery of lines, blurred and skittering, hints at standing and mounted figures moving processionally through a dusky mist of refined yet sensuous layers of color.

Beneath the formal elegance of Evening Rendezvous, however, runs the subtle inflection of Lewis's lifelong political activism and humanitarian concerns. One of several paintings inspired by the Ku Klux Klan, the work alludes to the organization's clandestine activities. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lewis continued to explore his response to the issues and events of the Civil Rights movement in a group of black-and-white abstractions that evolved from his powerful Klan-related paintings. Now the subject of reappraisal, Lewis's works establish the degree to which his poetic sensibility and social consciousness informed his improvisational synthesis of gesture, line, and color.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan African-American Art: 19th and 20th-Century Selections (brochure. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art)

Related Books

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African American Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
African American Masters focuses on black artists whose efforts in the twentieth century demonstrate their command of mainstream traditions as well as the open assertion and exploration of their dual heritage. Many—like Sargent Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, James Porter, and William H. Johnson—responded in the 1930s and 1940s to Alain Locke's call for an art of the “New Negro” and explored the social and narrative aspects of African or African American sources. Others—Henry Ossawa Tanner, Beauford Delaney, and Norman Lewis—embraced broader themes or the modernist challenges of form and color. Contemporary artists—from Betye Saar and Mel Edwards to Renée Stout and Whitfield Lovell—have mined sources as varied as the autobiographical and the international. Horace Pippin and Purvis Young, as self-taught artists, tapped the spiritual and social underpinnings of their communities. Portraits and documentary images have dominated the subject matter of modern black photographers. James VanDerZee and Roland Freeman epitomize those photographers who have chosen the people and environment of their own neighborhoods as their subjects. Others, foremost among them Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks, have sought out communities or traditions of the larger African American society.