Uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №2 Course paper Theme: Norman lewis-his life and work

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1. Norman Lewis
Norman Lewis, in full Norman Wilfred Lewis, (born July 23, 1909, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 27, 1979, New York City), Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher who diverged from his native Harlem community of artists in choosing abstraction over representation as his mode of expression.
Lewis was born in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City to immigrants from Bermuda. He showed interest in art from a young age and studied drawing and commercial design in high school. After high school for a time he made a living pressing clothes and as a tailor, but at age 20 he took a job with the merchant marine and traveled on a freighter throughout South America and the Caribbean. When he returned to Harlem about three years later, he met the sculptor Augusta Savage, who had her own studio and became a mentor to Lewis. He studied with her at her school in Harlem from 1933 to 1935, at which time he also took art courses at Columbia University. Those years brought about fruitful encounters with many artists and writers. Lewis joined the 306 group, a salon of artists and writers (e.g., Charles Alston, Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and Ralph Ellison) who met at 306 West 141st Street in Harlem and aimed to promote and support the careers of emerging African American artists. In 1935, with members of the 306 group, he became a founding member of the Harlem Artists Guild. It was through those groups that he became a friend of Romare Bearden. In 1936 he joined the

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Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a teacher. He taught art at the Harlem Community Arts Center (which opened with the efforts of the Harlem Artists Guild) and at a public school. Throughout the 1930s, while making a living as a teacher, Lewis was painting in a Social Realist style (The Yellow Hat, 1936). His works of that era show the influence of Alain Locke’s New Negro movement, Cubism, jazz, and African sculpture, the latter of which he had seen in a landmark exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1935. The iconography and geometry of African sculpture and the influence of jazz became mainstays in his work.
After the WPA came to an end in 1943, Lewis found a job teaching at the newly established George Washington Carver School, a community school for students from low-income families in Harlem, where his colleagues included artists Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White, among others. Lewis began experimenting with abstraction in the mid-1940s. He did not abandon figuration entirely, especially early on. In such paintings as The Dispossessed (Family) (1940), Meeting Place (1941), and Hep Cats (1943), Lewis used gestural calligraphic lines to create suggestions of figures within looser representations of the urban landscape. By the late 1940s Lewis was using highly abstracted forms in his paintings, but they often still could be discerned as figures (Crossing, 1948).
In 1949 Lewis had his first of many solo exhibitions at the Willard Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Soon after, he began also exhibiting with the

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Abstract Expressionists, and in 1950 he was the only African American artist involved in the discussion sessions at Studio 35 on East Eighth Street during which the central artists of the movement hashed out the definition of Abstract Expressionism. In 1951 he participated in the exhibition “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America” at MoMA. Four years later he painted one of his best-known paintings, Harlem Turns White (1955), which shows a mass of abstracted figures at the bottom of the canvas with a white haze settling over them. It is a work that can be interpreted in any number of ways but conjures questions of identity and tensions between black and white communities. Lewis described in interviews the personal tension he experienced as an African American artist working in abstraction, which at that time was an almost exclusively white (predominantly male) aesthetic. In 1956 his painting Cathedral (1950) was included in a special exhibition for the Venice Biennale “American Artists Paint the City,” organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Though Lewis diverged from his peers in Harlem when he chose abstraction over realism, he maintained strong ties to and engagement with his community. In 1963 he was a founding member of Spiral, a group of black artists, including Hale Woodruff, Bearden, and Alston, who committed to the civil rights movement visually, through their art. From 1965 through 1971 he taught art at Harlem Youth in Action, an antipoverty organization. Lewis was active in the protest against the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 exhibition “Harlem on My Mind,” which was O'Connor, William Douglas (1866). The Good Gray Poet. New York: Bunce and Huntington (The Walt Whitman Archive).
lambasted for examining contemporary African American art from an exclusively anthropological viewpoint and neglected to seek input from the African American community. That year he cofounded with Bearden and Ernest Crichlow the Cinque Gallery, dedicated to supporting and exhibiting emerging African American artists. From 1972 to 1979, the year he died, Lewis taught at the Art Students League. Among his honours were a Mark Rothko Foundation grant and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (both 1972) and a Guggenheim fellowship (1975). The first retrospective of Lewis’s work was held in 1976 at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Though he did not fare as well as his white peers of the Abstract Expressionist movement, he gained significant recognition posthumously through exhibitions and publications. In 2014–15 he was the subject of an exhibition alongside Lee Krasner (“From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945–1952”), another Abstract Expressionist whose talent was not given due recognition until well beyond the movement’s heyday. A retrospective in 2015–16 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (“Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis”) shed light on Lewis’s career for a new generation.
Lewis came from a Welsh family and in later life identified – at least partially – as Welsh, but he was born at Clifton, Carterhatch Lane, Enfield, Middlesex, a suburb of London, to pharmacist Richard George Lewis (d. 1936) and his wife Louise Charlotte (née Evans; d. 1950). His parents became spiritualists after the deaths of Lewis's elder brothers, and hoped young Lewis would grow up to become a medium. A clever child, Lewis was bullied by other children, and sent by his parents to live for a couple of years with three deeply religious "half-mad aunts" in Wales. Having been educated at Enfield Grammar School, as a young man, Lewis tried a variety of ways to make a living in the Great Depression of the 1930s, including self-employed wedding photographer, auctioneer, umbrella wholesaler and briefly a motorcycle racer at Harringay Stadium and White City. At this time of his life, he was a "young rake and dandy" with a "love of fast cars and adventure". For some years during this period, he set up home in Woodberry Down near Manor House in London.
Lewis's different books give varying accounts of his British Army service in World War II. In his autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he says he served in the Intelligence Corps in Algiers, Tunisia and Naples in 1942-44; elsewhere says he was eventually commissioned as a second lieutenant and served with the 1st King's Dragoon Guards, an armoured regiment in the Italian Campaign.[citation needed] His account of experiences during the Allied occupation of Italy, Naples '44 (1978) was called by The Telegraph "one of the great first-hand accounts of the Second World War." Shortly after the war he wrote books about Burma, Golden Earth (1952), and French Indochina, A Dragon Apparent (1951), which The Telegraph similarly praised as " the finest record of Indo-China before the devastation wrought by the Vietnam War".
Another major concern of Lewis's was the impact of missionary activity on tribal societies in Latin America and elsewhere. He was hostile to the activities of

https://poets.org/poet/walt-whitman
missionaries, especially American evangelicals. This is covered in his book The Missionaries, and several shorter pieces. He frequently said that he regarded his life's major achievement as the worldwide reaction to writing on tribal societies in South America. In 1968, his article "Genocide in Brazil", published in the Sunday Times after a journey to Brazil with the war photographer Don McCullin, created such an outcry that it led to the creation of the organisation Survival International, dedicated to the protection of first peoples around the world. Lewis later said of this article that it was "the most worthwhile of all my endeavours".
Lewis was fascinated by cultures which were little touched by the modern world. This was reflected in his books on travels in Indonesia, An Empire of the East, and among the tribal peoples of India, A Goddess in the Stones.
Lewis wrote several volumes of autobiography, again concerned primarily with his observations of the many places in which he lived at various times, including St Catherine's Island in South Wales near Tenby, the Bloomsbury district of London during World War II, Nicaragua, a Spanish fishing village (Voices of the Old Sea), and a village near Rome.
Lewis also wrote twelve novels. Some of these enjoyed significant success at the time of publication, but his literary reputation rests mainly on his travel writing.
Lewis's first wife, Ernestina Corvaja, was a Swiss-Sicilian. Sicilian life, including the role of the Mafia, was a major theme, which he explored in The

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Honoured Society (1964) and In Sicily (2000). While never losing sight of the horrors inflicted by the Mafia, his accounts were not sensationalist. They were based on a detailed understanding of Sicilian society, and a deep sympathy with the sufferings of the Sicilian people. The Latin connection encouraged him to travel, resulting in his first book, Spanish Adventure (1935). The marriage had however failed by the start of the Second World War in 1939. He was briefly married a second time, after the war.
He died in Saffron Walden, Essex, survived by his third wife, Lesley, and their son, Gawaine, and two daughters, Kiki and Samara; and by a son, Gareth, and daughter, Karen, from his second marriage with Hester; and by a son, Ito, from his first marriage. His son Gareth is also a published writer.
Lewis said that he believed in "absolutely nothing" and indeed "I do not believe in belief." He did not believe that humanity was making progress. He talked about "the intense joy I derive from being alive", and said he was "exceedingly happy".

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