Auction Spotlight

Norman Lewis (1909-1979)

Lot 153, Untitled, Dancer, c. 1950

Oil on canvas

29-1/2 x 34 inches

Unsigned

Provenance: the estate of the artist, Bill Hodges Gallery

Exhibited (illustrated): Norman Lewis, Shades of Blackness, Bill Hodges Gallery,

November 18, 2021-January 29, 2022; illustration, p. 27

Norman Lewis began making black paintings (by definition) in the mid-1940s, and he continued until the later 1970s. In the catalog of the exhibition Norman Lewis, Shades of Blackness, Bill Hodges writes,

“Norman Lewis was not an abstract expressionist, his works were carefully planned. All of the works in this catalog were carefully planned.”

(This included, Untitled, Dancer). This is an important point, because the artist did not end up at a finished composition by accident or a random act; rather it was fully intentional. Several similar works to this one may be seen in Procession, The Art of Norman Lewis , edited by Ruth Fine (2015), which was the accompanying catalog to a major retrospective show of the artist’s work in 2015. These are: Metropolitan Crowd, 1946 (Delaware Art Museum) [p. 55]; untitled, 1950, [fig. 28, p. 43]; Night Vision, [p. 60]; and Undistinguishable Being, 1952 [p. 63].

Lewis refuted scholars’ insistence his interest in black was a social and subjective commentary, linked to his race. He stated it was a formal device and he first employed the priority of a monochromatic approach when painting rhododendrons. (See: Procession, The Art of Norman Lewis, Rhododendrons in Winter, 1948 [p.63]). In reality, it was likely both: Kellie Jones, who organized an exhibition of Lewis’ black paintings in 1985, said that for Lewis “the color black (figured both as a dominant compositional element in his abstract paintings and a social comment.”)

REF: Norman Lewis, Shades of Blackness, (essay by Michaela Lunz, p. 5)

Lewis started it. Many of the abstract expressionist painters were concerned with racism and experimented with black paintings (e.g., Lewis’ good friend Ad Reinhardt), but most would deny the narrative, like Lewis himself. Similarly, he publicly expressed his objection toward painting subjects of African themes or even social commentary because it limited his audience and his opportunities to be shown in mainstream galleries —yet he did it anyway. (REF: The Search for Freedom, African American Abstract Painting 1945-1975; Anne Gibson, Two Worlds: African American Abstraction in New York at Mid-Century; Kenkeleba Gallery, 1991) Scholars such as Anne Gibson point out, Lewis painted abstract paintings, but then titled them Alabama and Journey to an End. One might say Lewis’ work held together many contentious elements in style and content, or one might say he simply didn’t play by any rules.

The following essay concerning untitled, Dancers (1950) was written by Lisa N. Peters, PhD. Ms. Peters is an art scholar and researcher. Recent books, catalogs and articles include: John Henry Twachtman Catalogue Raisonne (2021), The Ongoing Story of the Armory Show (1913), and Thomas Sills, Man of Color (2021).

A lifelong resident of Harlem, Norman Wilfred Lewis was dedicated throughout his career to an adventurous exploration of many artistic forms and media and to the support of African American art and social justice. (1) Born in 1909 in Harlem to parents who emigrated from Bermuda, Lewis initially studied art on his own by copying examples from art history books.(2) In his early twenties, he spent three years intermittently as a seaman on ocean liners that traveled to South America and the Caribbean. Among his jobs during the early 1930s was working as a textile and garment presser for the Armenian immigrant Haig Kasebian, who became a second father to Lewis, teaching him to sew and encouraging his artistic work. In 1933, Lewis was given studio space by the African American sculptor Augusta Savage at the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, located in a basement on West 143d Street in Harlem, in exchange for cleaning the studio. During this time, he received instruction from Savage, whose students included Jacob Lawrence and Lawrence's future wife Gwendolyn Knight.3 In 1933-34, Lewis studied briefly on a scholarship with Raphael Sayer at the John Reed Club, New York.

In 1934, Lewis joined the 306 Group, a collective consisting of a group of Harlem artists including Savage, Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Richard Wright, Charles Alston, and Henry Bannarn, who shared a space in which to work and socialize. Along with Savage and Alston, Lewis was a cofounder in 1935 of the Harlem Artists Guild. The Guild was created as a discussion forum for Harlem artists as well as to promote the careers of young Black artists, provide a liaison between artists and the public, and to improve conditions for African American artists. The Guild remained in existence until 1941.

Throughout his life, Lewis had a passion for learning and self-education. In the 1930s, he attended classes at Columbia University, Teachers College. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was an active participant in the Harlem Community Art Center, where he interacted with writers, musicians, and artists. He further expanded his knowledge by building an extensive personal library and avidly visiting museums. (4) During the Great Depression Lewis was hired as an art teacher by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). While engaged by the WPA in 1935, he worked alongside Jackson Pollock.(5) After the program ended in 1943, Lewis taught along with Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White at the George Washington Carver School, which served low­ income Harlem families. He taught art from 1944 to 1949 at the Thomas Jefferson School of Social Science, Philadelphia.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Lewis's work was figurative and social realist in content,exemplified in paintings such as Girt with Yellow Hat, 1936 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth), Harlem Jazz Jamboree, 1943 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and The Dispossessed Family, 1940 (The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for theArts).(6) However, in the mid-1940s, he began to question social-protest art. His desire was to "develop a whole new concept of myself as a painter."(7) He became convinced that art does not have the power to change the political state but could have an impact through aesthetic means. He stated at the time: "The excellence of [the Black artist's] work will be the most effective blow against stereotype and the most irrefutable proof of the artificiality of stereotype in general."(8) He turned from illustrative statements that mirrored social conditions, seeking "something of deeper and philosophic content."(9) Concurrent with Pollock's journey from figuration to abstraction, in 1946, he began a series of performance-themed works, mediating Abstract Expressionism with the social dimensions of jazz, in an exploration of the relationship between the artist and the medium and the individual in a group context. (10) The art historian Ann Gibson pointed out a difference, for example, between Pollock and Lewis; whereas Pollock "adapted the formal structures of jazz but left its references to its African American roots behind," Lewis "meshed analyses of the structure of jazz with visual references to its production."(11)

In '"Pure Eye Music': Norman Lewis, Abstract Expressionism and Bebop," the art historian Sara Wood describes Lewis's path in the late 1940s from works in which there are suggestions of musicians and their instruments to works in which the "human content becomes more allusive than visible," forming a synthesis of musicians with one another and with their instruments in what "may be seen as a visual representation of music ... so that the performers of the music are no longer divisible from the sounds they create."(12) Examples include Jazz Band, 1948 (artist's estate), untitled, 1949 and City Night, 1949 (Museum of Modem Art, New York), Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration, 1951 (Museum of FineArts, Boston), Street Music, 1950 (Buffalo AKG Art Museum), Arctic Night, 1951-52 (The Studio Museum in Harlem), Blending, ca. 1951 (Munson Museum, Utica, New York), and the present work, untitled (dancer), ca. 1950. That these works are quite different in their rhythms and energies is indicative of their jazz impulses while exemplifying Lewis's opposition to stereotypes by resisting a fixed artistic identity.

Untitled (dancer) is not a representation of dance, but of its movement made visual. Its phantom energies form a centripetal vortex, suggestive of a dark vision of a storm in a work by J.M.W. Turner. Rendered with dark pigment applied over underlayers of light hues-pinks and greens­ exposed by dry brushes in sweeping movements that reveal the underpaint, the painting is also suggestive of an urban night in which pulsing rays of light swirl and rotate over city lights, water, and architectural structures. Several of Lewis's titles at this time refer to night and the city. Ruth Fine describes Lewis's method then as one in which he used a drybrush method relating to the stippling techniques he was using in drawings, producing what she describes as "softly rendered amorphous surfaces."(13) In untitled (dancer) the paint creates the illumination that vibrates from within the darkness of a space that evokes a cavern-like jazz club, its sounds and vitality. The nocturnal theme is recurrent in Lewis's art-according to his partner Joan Murray Weissman, he "really loved night: he loved going out at night, and he loved the sky with stars in it, and he loved lights. He was a night kind of guy."(14) In the mid-1970s, Lewis returned to an approach similar to that in untitled (dancer) in a series of "Atmospherics," in which he used swirls of bluish-white dry-brush paint making forms appear to emerge gradually from atmospheric darkness. (15)

Untitled (dancer) was perhaps among the works included in Lewis's solo exhibitions at Willard Gallery, New York, in April 1950, November 1951, and November 1952 (his first show at Willard was in 1949).(16) In Artnews in 1950, Dorothy Seckler commented that Lewis had achieved "melodic decorative effects from his color and line studies of varied patterns of growth and motion." Seckler stated: "Working against backgrounds of soft smoky greys, he builds up larger shapes by the almost molecular interlocking of small, fragmented planes, airily laced together by a fluent, often accented line" and remarked that a work titled Fire Flower featured "a motif that whirls ... intricately [encountering] no resistance either from space itself or from any counter movement."(17) Although Fire Flower was painted in "flaming color," the description otherwise would fit the present painting. In 1951, a review in Artnews described Blending as a work that "appears like an unearthly cathedral hung with icicles."(18) These paintings belong to what Ruth Bass has described as Lewis's postwar abstractions of "gentle mystery," with their "wonderful calligraphic line" moving "through "dark but flickering fields of color."(19)

Lewis's exhibition at Willard in 1952, was reviewed by Henry McBride in Artnews, who headed his article with "Celestial Navigation," the title of one of the works on view. McBride called Lewis "a poet of aerial moods, blowing cold in the Arctic Night and warming considerably in the Industrial Night." He felt the artist was "a musician as well as a painter, for he starts in softly on the blank page like a musician improvising and as he sees a suitable motif taking shape, swings into it with confidence, plays it up for what it is worth and then, satisfied he has gone the whole way with it, permits it to fade softly out." To McBride, the variability in Lewis's work was due to the fact that he delved "into ethereal matters which are immeasurable and which to compress might be dangerous."(20) Lewis concurred in his own conception of art as "the expression of unconscious experiences ... strained through the artist's own peculiar associations and use of his medium." Lewis stated, "art is a language in itself, embodying purely visual symbols which cannot properly be translated into words, musical notes or, in the case of painting, three­ dimensional objects, and to attempt such is to be unable to admit the function of art or understand its language."(21)

Lewis modified his style several times in the years ahead, returning more insistently to the figure in a group of "Rituals" and abstract forms that march across blackened canvases in "Processionals." His late works included a blend of abstraction and figuration. Considered the only African American artist to be part of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Lewis attended meetings at Studio 35, at 35 East Eighth Street, organized by Willem de Koening and Franz Kline. He was present at the invitation-only meetings in 1950 in which leading Abstract Expressionists met for discussions about their own work and the modern art scene. Those who participated included Janice Biala, Louise Bourgeois, Hans Hofmann, de Koening, Robert Motherwell, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, and Hedda Sterne. In 1963-65, Lewis was part of the Spiral Group, which met to discuss the potential of Black artists to engage with issues of racial equality and struggle through their work. In 1969, he founded the Cinque Gallery with Bearden and Ernest Crichlow. That year he was part of the protest in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in reaction against the exhibition, Harlem on My Mind, in which not a single Black artist was included. Lewis taught at the Harlem Youth in Action program from 1965 to 1971 and at the Art Students League from 1972 until his death, which occurred unexpectedly in 1979, when he was age seventy.

Lisa N. Peters, PhD

1 Among many sources on Lewis are Ruth Fine, Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2015); Stephanie Saloman, ed., Norman Lewis: Black Paintings, 1947-1977, exh. cat. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1998); Mindy Tan, "Norman Lewis and the Art of Abstract Resistance," PhD dissertation, Purdue University, 2015; Mindy Tan, Norman W Lewis & Company, exh. cat. (Brooklyn: Bill Hodges Gallery, 2017); Hilary Haakenson, "Norman Lewis: Rhythm and Self-Representation," Rutgers Art Review 26 (2010): 17-33; and Sara Wood, '"Pure Eye Music,': Norman Lewis, Abstract Expressionism and Bebop," in Graham Lock and David Murray, eds., The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art (New York: Oxford, 2009).

2 The birthplace of Lewis's parents Dinah Caines and Wilfred N. Lewis was St. Kitts. They immigrated to New York in 1906-7. Lewis was the middle of three sons.

3 See Adriana Campbell, "Chronology," in Fine, pp. 246-47. Lewis later denied that he was Savage's student but his is listed as her pupil in numerous newspaper articles.

4 Fine, p. 23, 27-29 discusses Lewis's early art influences.

5 Saloman, pp. 118-19.

6 Other examples are illustrated in Fine, pp. 36-39.

7 Norman Lewis, "Thesis," in Corinne Jennings, ex., Norman Lewis: From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction, exh. cat. (New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1989), p. 63.

8 Ibid.

9 Quoted in Wood, p. 154.

10 Discussed in Wood.

11 Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997),

p. 32.

12 Wood, p. 109.

13 Fine, p. 62.

14 Quoted in Ann Eden Gibson, "Black is a Color: Norman Lewis and Modernism in New York," in Saloman, p. 18.

15 Examples are included in Tan 2017.

16 The paintings in these shows are listed in Fine, pp. 255-56. In 1950, he showed: Fire Flower, 1949; Arctic Night, 1949; Autumn Garden, 1949; Gateway, 1949; Landscape, 1949; Window, 1949; Harbor Lights, 1950; Pussy Willows, 1948; Five Phases, 1949; Play, 1948; Winter Branches, 1949; Holiday, 1949; City Lights, 1949. In 1951, he showed: Blending, Newer Grounds, Flames to Freeze, Night Rhapsody, New Born Millions, More Soft than Rain, Every Atom Glows, Sunset, Pinnacles, More than Dust, Spring Voted, Chrome, New Moon, Certain Total, Green Bough, Pif.lle, No Less a Summer Morning (all 1951). In 1952, he showed: The Messenger, Dusty Sunset, Arctic Night, Enchantment, Seascape, Awakening, Industrial Night, Pleiades, Sinister Doings by Gaslight, Celestial Navigation (all 1952).

Lewis ceased his association with Willard in 1965.

17 D[orothy] S[eckler], "Norman Lewis," Artnews 49 (April 1950): 43.

18 R.C. "Norman Lewis," Artnews 50 (November 1951), p. 58

19 Ruth Bass, ''Norman Lewis," Artnews 97 (June 1998): 123.

20 Henry McBride, "Celestial Navigation," Artnews 51 (December 1952): 47, 67.

21 Undated statement in artist's files, published in the catalogue for an exhibition of contemporary art at the University of Illinois in 1950. Quoted in Fine, pp. 98-99.