Aaron Payne FINE ART

NORMAN WILFRED LEWIS

(b. 1909, Harlem, New York d. 1979, New York)

Education

Savage School of Arts and Crafts, New York (1933) Columbia University, New York

Solo Exhibitions (partial list)

1976 Retrospective Exhibition, Graduate Center of City College, New York 1998 Norman Lewis: Black Paintings 1946-1977, (April 1 – September 20, 1998) The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York 1999 Norman Lewis: Intuitive Markings – Works on Paper, 1945-1975, (May 6 – August 13, 1999) Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Collections (partial list)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey

Selected Book Reference aaron payne FINE ART biography NORMAN LEWIS 2

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“A History of African-American Artists from 1972 to the Present,” Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, Pantheon Books, New York, 1993.

Born in New York City, Norman Lewis focused his work on African-American life in Harlem. He studied at Columbia University with help from the WPA project in the 1930s and later worked with Augusta Savage. Lewis was one of several Black artists commissioned by the WPA to decorate the Harlem Art Center.

During the Great Depression, Lewis taught art through the Federal Arts Project at the Harlem Community Arts Center (1936-1939) and later with Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White at the George Washington Carver School. Lewis went to the 306 location in New York which was an artist’s workshop headed by artist Charles Alston. The 306 served as a center for the most creative minds in Harlem. Although Lewis joined the Artist’s Union and was an ardent political activists, he believed that “political and social aspects should not be the primary concern; esthetic ideas should have preference.”

Lewis is known for non-objective, ethnic genre-views, but his work of the late 1930s and early 1940s was predominately figurative social realism that depicted the lives of the urban Black families and workers in New York.

Around 1945, Lewis began to paint more abstract expressionism works. He abandoned realism and painted more abstract works becoming an important artist of the New York School and Abstract Expressionist movement by the end of the 1940s. By the late 1940s Lewis was represented by Willard Gallery in New York City and had developed his own personal style that consisted of fluid forms suggesting groups of figures in activity.

In the 1930s Lewis began to veer towards abstraction, eventually joining the Spiral Group in the 1960s. The Spiral Group produced art in response to the civil rights movement. Lewis worked at the Art Student’s League and helped found the Cinque Gallery with fellow artists Ernie Crichlow and Romare Bearden. The Cinque Gallery was dedicated to helping emerging minority artists.

In 1955, Lewis received the Carnegie International Award in Painting, making him the first African- American artist to receive this prestigious prize. As a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1972, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1975, Lewis received his first retrospective exhibition in 1976 at the Graduate Center of City College in New York.

Until World War II Lewis’s canvases attempted to portray the social struggles of black Americans and the “togetherness,” as he called it, of working people fighting against racial oppression and exploitation. With the outbreak of World War II, discrimination in the armed forces prompted Lewis to seek industrial work. He studied marine drafting but found nobody would hire a black marine draftsman. He went to the Kaiser shipyards in Seattle where he became a ship fitter. White aaron payne FINE ART biography NORMAN LEWIS 3

------welders refused to work for a Black ship fitter so Lewis was given useless, demoralizing tasks. The threat of physical violence forced Lewis to leave his job at the Kaiser shipyard. During this period, Lewis occasionally sketched “ideas for paintings” which gradually led him to abandon Social Realists paintings for an increasingly abstract style of painting. Lewis believed that his portrayals of evictions and lynching had been of no help to anyone. He became embittered and suffered inner conflict. Lewis struggled to accept the fact that his paintings had not changed America’s attitude towards racial discrimination. Lewis also had deep feelings about the beauty of nature and the wonder of beauty found all around the world – the rising and falling of the sea – the rising and setting of the sun – the moon at night and the mysteries of the universe.

Lewis rejected socially conscious painting as limiting his expression. Increasingly drawn to the Abstract Expressionist movement, he attended Friday evening meetings at “The Club” later called “Studio 35 “ which de Kooning, Kline and others organized in an 8th Street Loft. The Club talked about freedom – about being free of old traditions – old ideas – about trying to let the paint show the artist’s feelings. Lewis was attracted to the aesthetic theories and the belief that each artist has the right to determine how he should paint.

In discussing the relationship of his external environment to his work, Lewis told Charles Wendal Childs: “I’m a loner and paint out of a certain self-imposed remoteness. When I’m at work, I usually remove my state of mind from the Negro environment I live in…I paint what’s inside, and like to think of it as a very personal, very individual environment…”

Norman Lewis died unexpectedly on August 27, 1979. Teaching was Lewis’s major means of survival. The art world is now re-discovering an artist who taught children to be idealistic, to dream, to have high standards, to reject shortcuts and to be committed to the ideal in art.