Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis (born July 23, 1909, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 27, 1979, New York City) was an 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 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).

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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 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 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.