Norman Lewis at June Kelly, Bill Hodges and the Studio Museum - Brief Article

The time is right for a reevaluation of abstract painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979) the sole African-American among the Abstract Expressionists. Like others of his generation, Lewis revolveed to abstraction from Depression-era Social Realism. Yet--like small in number of his peers--he remained politically active.

A trio of novel exhibitions, at the Studio Museum and the galleries of Bill Hodge and June Kelly signaled that the overdue reconsideration of Lewis's career is below way. The gallery shows revealed that Lewis was primarily a colorist given to delicate brushwork, atmospheric spaces and elegant compositions. at the same time he was also intrigued through contrasts. The Studio Museum's "Norman Lewis: Black Paintings 1946-1977" consisting of 60 oils and works upon paper, concentrated on his recurring use of black.

Lewis exerciseed matte black to alter the luminosity and tone of other colors. His Woman (1948) is an angular figure closer to Picasso's ironing plod than de Kooning's voluptuous seductresse Red and blacks are delineated by means of white outlines, so that the r areas float while the black negative spaces retire In Blue and Boogie, an abstraction made a quarter hundred later, Lewis turned concentric bend s into a deep vortex, with black areas indicating mysterious valleys among sensuous indigo ridges.

For an artist relate toed with race relations, black is too significant a color to be used barely for formal juxtapositions. Lewis's black paintings frequently refer to the civil-rights try so directly as to belie any claims to unstained abstraction. In Ku Klux (1963) a black canvas is bisected by the agency of strokes of white paint forming a line of pointed hoods. In Processional (1965) fluid slashes of white paint chop a thick band across a black field that expands wider as it moves from left to right. The propelling motion and suggestion of receding mass recall Jim Karales's iconic photographs of the march from Selma to Montgomery in the year the painting was executed

While the cumulative impact of these exhibitions is a convincing argument for Lewis's place in the history of postwar art, the Studio Museum's opening gallery was les persuasive. Here Lewis was compared with other abstractionists who worked with black, nevertheless of these, only Reinhardt and Kline were as intent in its pursuit. The others--de Kooning, Pollock Motherwell, Rauschenberg--seem to have been added to imply that Lewis belongs among of the like kind august company. Lewis doesn't ne the help, although Greenbergian purists would find fault with his elegance and pictorial profundity as well as his effort to balance abstraction and social issues. The comparisons weren't suitable. admitting Lewis's standing is not in doubt, revisionism is not for a like reason simple as carving another niche in the canon.

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