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

5. Norman Lewis: The last years
Toward the end of his life in 1972, African-American artist Norman Lewis wrote an eye-catching pitch to a New York gallerist: “I have read that you have not stopped discovering talent and helping artists. Your valuable assistance is needed—I have talent … ”
That Lewis felt the need to be “discovered” so late in his career is perhaps a reflection of his own unmet expectations. More likely, a late-career effort to be soundly acknowledged among New York School painters by joining the stable of a gallery owner who famously promoted them. An abstract expressionist painter who had also worked with social-realist themes, Lewis was hardly a new talent. While not as popularly known as some of his black contemporaries—Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence—Lewis produced a broad collection of work, which is now the subject of an exhibit in Philadelphia.
“Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis,” on view through April 3 at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, hopes to enshrine Lewis within the annals of American art history. This first-ever comprehensive exhibition of his work is intended to bring recognition and knowledge about the artist to a broad audience and burnish a legacy that many believe warrants a more favorable critical reception.
“Procession” includes approximately 90 paintings and drawings 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 that often overlap or intersect aesthetically.
Ruth Fine, curator of the exhibition, makes no bones about Lewis’ artistic gifts and vision, cautioning, however, that attempts to define or categorize Lewis’ art with any single label—social realist, abstract expressionist, Black Arts Movement—misses the breadth of his aesthetic accomplishment.
Among Lewis’ own musings about the nature of painting, we may find markers to garner insight about his artistic intent throughout a multifaceted career: “ … In any great picture you will find a whole system of values, some scientific, some formal, some spiritual[.] The artist assembles, accumulates and composes in a material medium a number of desires, intentions and conditions received from all points of his mind and being …”
The mature Lewis, especially in his Rhythm of Nature and Summation series, can be seen to explore transcendental aspects of nature while embracing and translating his specific context through universalist meanings and sensations. In other words, he eschews realist protest art in an era rife with it.
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 transitioned to more nonobjective 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.

At the end of the 1960s, Lewis founded an art gallery, Cinque Gallery, with Bearden and others, and he taught at the Arts Students League of New York throughout the 1970s. He died largely unknown in 1979, though, as the exhaustive catalog accompanying this exhibition explains, he had been actively shown throughout his life and was not unknown among the art-world cognoscenti.