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4. Fascinated by Act of Painting
This trend toward abstraction was also evident in the work of white artists at the same time. Lewis arrived at an abstract style somewhat independently, but by the late 1940s, he was identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement, which was centered in New York City, and was characterized by abstract patterns and by a fascination with the act of painting itself. The group’s leader, Jackson Pollock, climbed ladders and let paint drip onto canvases from on high. Lewis had the same way of thinking. “Just manipulating the paint was exciting to me,” he was quoted as saying, according to the New York Times.
In 1946 he gained the sponsorship of a prestigious retailer, New York’s Willard Gallery. Art historian Elsa Honig Fine, author of The Afro-American Artist, noted, however, that wealthy art buyers at gallery openings “were more likely to ask him for a drink than to discuss his aesthetic theories.” Still, Lewis made several friends among leading white Abstract Expressionists, including Mark Tobey and Lyonel Feininger, and he continued to develop his own vision of the style. One key breakthrough came in the mid-1950s while Lewis was fishing near Block Island. Sitting in fog, he noticed how it obscured the outlines of shapes, yet seemed to reveal their essential qualities. Many of his subsequent abstract paintings feature hazy forms with muted yet luminous colors, quite distinct from the increasingly severe and theory-driven productions of some of Lewis’s white contemporaries. A painting like 1960’s Good Morning, although completely abstract, seems to suggest a sunrise, or a growing light of a more inward kind.
Some art historians view the Abstract Expressionist movement as a retreat from the political sphere after the horrors of World War II, and Lewis agreed that art should avoid direct political statements. “Painting pictures about social conditions doesn’t change the social conditions,” Lewis said in a 1977 film quoted in Artforum International. Lewis himself, however, was artistically inspired by the civil rights era. He sometimes made direct references to it, as in a 1960 painting titled Ku Klux Klan, which contained a sequence of hoodlike shapes. Lewis taught at HARYOUACT (Harlem Youth in Action), a Harlem youth cultural group that flowered in the 1960s. He was a co-founder of the Spiral Group, an association of black artists, and in 1969 he co-founded the Cinque Gallery. In 1971 Lewis was at the center of controversy when he withdrew his works from a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art after conflict flared between curators and several African-American artists.
One marker of Lewis’s work during this period was his frequent use of black paint. Acccording to an exhibition catalogue essay quoted in the New York Times, Lewis “claimed that his interest in black was purely formal,” but critic Grady Turner, writing in Art in America, argued that “for an artist concerned with race relations, black is too significant a color to be used merely for formal juxtapositions.” Turner pointed out that black played a key role in Lewis’s canvases of the 1960s that most directly evoked the civil rights struggle.
Lewis remained active until the end of his life, and painted a mural at the Brooklyn Boys’ High School a few years before his death in New York City on August 27, 1979. After his death, Lewis’s reputation declined somewhat, along with those of the other Abstract Expressionists, as art began once again to represent the outside world. But the 1990s saw a spate of exhibitions and re-evaluations of Lewis’s output. Some critics argued that Lewis ultimately showed less of the daring originality that Abstract Expressionism had in the hands of artists such as Pollock, but others found an artist who had consistently followed his own inner dictates and had produced something that transcended prevailing styles. “The stature of Lewis’s work is such that he can be seen as a paradigmatic artist and not merely as a late addition to the Abstract Expressionist canon,” wrote Susan Inniss on the website of the Bill Hodges Gallery. His works are held in the collections of numerous major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110710192647/http://engelsklenker.com/us_resource.php
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