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

3. Social realism and figurative work
Lewis began his career in 1930, with earlier mostly figurative work and social realism. He at first painted what he saw, which ranged from Meeting Place (1930), a swap meet scene, and The Yellow Hat (1936), a formal Cubist painting, to Dispossessed (1940), an eviction scene, and Jazz Musicians (1948), a visual depiction of the bebop music that was being played in Harlem. His social realism was painted with "an overtly figurative style, depicting bread lines, evictions, and police brutality."
Lewis said he struggled to express social conflict in his art, but in his later years, focused on the inherently aesthetic. "The goal of the artist must be aesthetic development," he told art historian Kellie Jones, "and in a universal sense, to make in his own way some contribution to culture."
In the late 1940s, his work became increasingly abstract. His total engagement with abstract expressionism was due partially to his disillusionment with America after his wartime experiences in World War II. It seemed extremely hypocritical that America was fighting "against an enemy whose master race ideology was echoed at home by the fact of a segregated armed forces." Seeing that art does not have the power to change the political state that society was in, he decided that people should develop their aesthetic skills more, instead of focusing on political art. Tenement I (1952), Harlem Turns White (1955), and Night Walker No. 2 (1956) are all examples of his style. Twilight Sounds (1947) and Jazz Band (1948) are examples of his interest in conveying music.
One of his best known paintings, Migrating Birds (1954), won the Popular Prize at the Carnegie Museum's 1955 Carnegie International Exhibition, the New York Herald-Tribune calling the painting "one of the most significant of all events of the 1955 art year." His signature style in those decades included repetitive ideographic or hieroglyphic elements that allowed Lewis to incorporate narrative sequences into his paintings.
He became interested in the Abstract Expressionist movement and began attending meetings at Studio 35 with The Irascibles, at a loft at 35 East Eighth Street, Manhattan. He was the only African-American in attendance and it was through these meetings he met David Smith, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Tobey, and Richard Lippold. However Lewis did not fully embrace the Abstract Expressionist movement because "it did not favor all artists equally", and he was struggling with attaining collectors and museums despite his awards and prestigious exhibition history. Norman Lewis was the only African-American artist among the first generation of abstract expressionists, but his work was overlooked by both White and African-American art dealers and gallery owners.
In his last 20 years, Lewis created and developed his very own unique blending of abstraction and figuration. His rhythmic lines and shapes now hinted at figures moving through his layers of colours. “Untitled” (ca. 1957) shows Lewis’s transition from pure abstraction towards this new approach, that blends abstraction with figuration.
Lewis was a founding member of Spiral, a group of artists and writers who met regularly between 1963 to 1965, that included Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, and Hale Woodruff. The group met "to discuss the potential of Black artists to engage with issues of racial equality and struggle in the 1960s through their work." The Spiral group disbanded in 1965, as a result of discrimination of the group, and Lewis felt that protesting was a better way to bring attention and deal with the social issues than painting was.
Despite Spiral's short existence, it was very impactful in the art world, as it called attention to many issues of racial inequality that existed at the time. For instance, due to Spiral and other groups' continuous protest against the 1968 controversial exhibit "Harlem on My Mind" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Black people became more visible in the art world. Before this exhibition, the Met did not feature anything on New York's cultural powerhouse neighborhood Harlem. Harlem is known for its art and music, but this exhibition featured no self-representation of that from the neighborhood and instead, it was composed of photographs that a non-Harlemite photographer took of the people who lived there.
In 1969, Lewis founded the Cinque Gallery in New York City along with Romare Bearden and Ernest Crichlow. During the same year, he protested in front of Metropolitan Museum of Art because of the highly controversial exhibition, Harlem On My Mind.
His later work includes Alabama II (1969), Part Vision (1971), and New World Acoming (1971), as well as a series called Seachange done in his last years.
From 1965-1971, he taught art for the Harlem Youth in Action program. He started teaching at the Art Students League of New York starting in 1972, and work there until his death in 1979.
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 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
https://www.britannica.com/art/American-literature/After-World-War-II.
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.
The highlights are familiar: The New York School of Renegades rising in the era of McCarthyism. “A child or a monkey can do that!” Sure, Jackson Pollack thought, slap dash dribbling away until the revolutionary brilliance of what he was not only doing, but that also couldn’t be replicated, was recognized, then sinking into a haze of alcohol, crashing his car and dying. The whiskey-soaked tales of the Cedar Tavern. The inspiration of jazz. Painters visually echoing Charlie Parker’s virtuosic improvisations as the vinyl spun in their Greenwich Village lofts. Willem de Kooning wrote: “Miles Davis bends the notes. He doesn’t play them, he bends them. I bend the paint.”
A familiar, fascinating and storied chapter that included artists of diverse identities — African American, American Indian, women, gays — but was dominated in the official discourse by heterosexual white men.
One of the most prodigious of the overlooked Abstract Expressionists was Norman Lewis. The first ever comprehensive museum overview on the artist, Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis is on view, November 13, 2015-April 3, 2016 at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA).
A San Francisco collector of Lewis’s work wrote to him in 1955 asking ‘Why the Hell Aren’t You Famous?’ according to Procession catalog essayist Jacqueline Francis. Ruth Fine notes in her catalog essay that Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, former MoMA curator and critic, riffing off the title of Ralph Ellison’s well-known book, The Invisible Man, once mused Norman Lewis is the “not quite ‘invisible man’ of Abstract Expressionism. Before this exhibition today’s art lovers might have to ask the same question as Lewis’s exasperated collector from the 1950s.
Ambitious in breadth and scope, Procession includes approximately 60 paintings on canvas and various types of board; and 30 drawings and paintings on paper. The exhibition is organized around six major themes—In the City; Visual Sound; Rhythm of Nature; Ritual; Civil Rights; Summation—each corresponding to major phases in the artist’s career which often overlap or intersect aesthetically.
Through Procession's comprehensive treatment, Norman Lewis is elevated within the history of American art. In addition to demonstrating why Lewis should be as famous as contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko, the exhibition brings coherence to interpretations of Lewis’ enigmatic yet prolific artistic career.
A companion exhibition at PAFA, Stone and Metal: Lithographs and Etchings by Norman Lewis features approximately 30 prints. A print thought to be Lewis’s first — an etching titled Trees, 1934, which is known in only one impression — is on view, as are unique color proofs from 1973/1975, that combine relief and intaglio printing techniques. Also shown are several little-known Depression-era lithographs by the artist and The Red Umbrella, 1972, Lewis’s most popular etching.
Born in Harlem in 1909 to parents from Bermuda, Lewis lived and worked in New York most of his life. He focused on figurative and figurative abstract work with social and jazz themes in the 1930s and early 1940s and transitions to more non-objective work in the late 1940s. In the late 1950s and early '60s he restricted his palette to the color black for a series of paintings. In 1963 he was a founding member of Spiral, a New York based group of African American artists (primarily painters) started in 1963. Spiral focused on protesting social injustice and how race factored into the mainstream art world's interpretations of the work of black artists.