Background
Norman Lewis was born on July 23, 1909 in New York, United States, to immigrants from Bermuda. Lewis recognized that he wanted to be an artist when just nine years old.
Norman Lewis was born on July 23, 1909 in New York, United States, to immigrants from Bermuda. Lewis recognized that he wanted to be an artist when just nine years old.
In high school, he studied drawing and commercial design. From 1933 to 1935, Lewis enrolled in her Savage School of Arts and Crafts based in Harlem, which was a center for black artists at the time. In addition to tutelage by Savage, Lewis was a student at Columbia University.
At the age of twenty, Lewis was employed as a seaman on a freighter and spent several years traveling about South America and the Caribbean. Upon leaving this position, he returned home to New York where he began to work, study, and, later, exhibit as an artist. In the early 1930s, inspired by the teachings of philosopher Alain Locke and his New Negro Movement, Lewis was excited by African art, which he arduously studied in several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art during the 1935 exhibition "African Sculpture." Lewis helped to organize the Harlem Artists Guild in 1935 - 1941, an organization that fostered opportunities for African-American artists, and focused on political and social concerns of the artists and the greater black community. He also was a member of the multi-racial, radical Artists' Union and participated in the communist-led John Reed Club. Lewis taught at the Harlem Community Arts Center, where a young Jacob Lawrence studied, and, in 1936, he began working for the Works Progress Administration of the Federal Arts Projects teaching art classes.
After the Works Progress Administration of the Federal Arts Projects ended in 1943, the artist went on to teach at the George Washington Carver School, alongside notable African American artists Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett. At this point in his development, Lewis was simultaneously influenced by African sculpture, painted as a Social Realist, and focused on the black community's struggles.
In the mid-1940s, Lewis began to experiment with pure abstraction, and became active in the New York School and Abstract Expressionism. New York's Willard Gallery represented Lewis and hosted his first solo exhibition in 1949. He went on to have nine solo shows within ten years at the Gallery, which managed his career until 1964. The works he exhibited highlighted his signature calligraphic line, suggestive of figural groups engaged in frenetic movement and energy. Concurrently, he taught high school alongside Reinhardt who became a close friend and ally. The artist also was part of and exhibited with the American Abstract Artists, which the painter Vaclav Vytacil introduced him to and where Reinhardt was also a member. Reinhardt included Lewis in his famous satirical drawing "How to Look at Modern Art." Although involved in all these activities, Lewis was never able to make a living on his art sales alone, and instead supported himself, his wife, and his daughter through teaching.
In 1950, Lewis was the sole African-American participant in the famous, closed-door symposium at Studio 35 set to defining abstract art. The following year, MoMA included Lewis's work in the influential exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America. While a member of this coveted inner circle of leading abstract artists, because of his race Lewis was paradoxically an outsider. During this time, Lewis's life and art were somewhat divided, perhaps contradictorily, as he was simultaneously part of the elite abstract art world, while also deeply connected to the arts and people of Harlem. The painter was also a specially invited exhibitor in a show organized by the Art Institute of Chicago to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale of 1956.
In 1963, Lewis was a founding member of SPIRAL, a group of black artists committed to assist the ongoing Civil Rights Movement through art. SPIRAL brought a wide array of aesthetic sensibilities to the table, always questioning the relationship of art and race to the Freedom Struggle. From 1965 to 1971, he taught for Harlem Youth in Action, an anti-poverty program designed to retain youth in school. In 1967, Lewis was one of numerous artists who picketed the Metropolitan Museum of Art's infamous exhibition "Harlem on My Mind", which was organized without input from the black community, treated art by African Americans in anthropological terms rather than aesthetically, and insulted many people. In 1969, along with artist Romare Bearden, he helped found the gallery Cinque for African American artists; Cinque was the slave name of the man stolen from Sierra Leone who led a rebellion against the slave ship Amistad. In the famous case, the Supreme Court in 1840 decided that Cinque and the other slaves had been illegally captured, and they were repatriated back to West Africa. The gallery highlighted the work of African-American and African art and artists, was dedicated to fostering the careers of black artists, and was part of the Black Arts Movement.
In the later part of his life, Lewis primarily focused on painting the natural world, especially seascapes which enabled him to express his profound love of the ocean. He also was a teacher at the Arts Students League. Lewis continued to move within black artists' circles; he outlived many of his Abstract Expressionist friends. In the early 1970s, he was awarded an NEA grant, a Mark Rothko Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship - all prestigious awards to support his painting. Still, he was only included in a smattering of exhibitions. It was not until 1976 that the artist was honored with his first retrospective. Lewis died unexpectedly in New York City in 1979. Today, Lewis’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, among others.
Norman was highly famous for being 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. One of his best known paintings, "Migrating Birds", created in 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."
Umbrella
Baule Mask
Untitled
Carved Bobbin (Guru)
Eye of the Storm(Seachange XV)
Harlem Courtyard
Girl With Yellow Hat
The Tenement
The Gremlins
Night Walk#2
Untitled (Police Beating)
Untitled
Evening Rendezvous
Green Mist
Industrial Night
Dan Mask
Ebb Tide
The Wanderer (Johnny)
Meeting Place
Miagrating Birds
The Gremlins
Lewis's work is characterized by the duality of abstraction and representation, using both geometric and natural forms, in the depiction of both the city and natural world, and expressing both righteous anger and joyous celebration. His paintings are singled out for their linear, calligraphic lines, along with his bright, expressive palette and atmospheric effects. Unlike other Abstract Expressionists, his technique and content never wholly gave over to the subjective.
He saw abstraction as a strategy to distance himself from racial artistic language, as well as the stereotypes of his time. Abstraction proved an important means to both artistic freedom and personal discovery.
Norman was married and had a daughter.
