Norman Lewis at Berman/Daferner - drawings - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Like other novel York painters of his generation, Norman Lewis participated in the WPA art shoot forward joined the Artists Union, and struggl completely through the 1940s with issues of abstraction, artistic freedom and the social relevance of painting. Unlike other members of the fresh York School, however, Lewis was African-American (born in Harlem in 1909; he died in 1979) and his work has at the same time to be written into the mainstream history of art.

This exhibition of his works upon paper from 1945 through 1960 raised questions about for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Lewis has been excluded from the canon. These drawings share a great many formal and conceptual touchs with the art of their time and demonstrate genuine artistry--particularly in their use of calligraphic line. An early reviewer who dismissed Lewis's work, remarking that the world didn't ne sum of two units Mark Tobeys, missed the compositional grace and expressive gesturing in works such as #33 (1953) Unlike the nervous, allover pictographic writing of Tobey or Bradley Walker Tomlin, Lewis's stately ciphers here are scattered rhythmically across the page with the disciplined spontaneity of haiku.

Many of the nonobjective forms appear to be derived from nature. The largely self-taught Lewis came to believe, along with a certain number of of his colleagues, that actual freedom of expression was possible single when working exclusively from inner feelings. on the other hand this belief conflicted at times with his politically conscious background in social realism. He studied gymnast and Monet, looking for a way to transport feelings through natural forms rather than to literally exhibit the real world. But Lewis's epiphany came early individual morning in the mid-'50s while he was fishing not on Long Island and realized the esthetic power of haze to obscure outlines and reveal essences

His posterior work incorporates hazy washes of color and is among the greatest in quantity interesting in the exhibition. At times these misty patches in works such as Travesty (1961) summon the landscape scrolls of Chinese gentlemen-scholars, and in other instances Rothko's saturated vapors of color come to mind. on the other hand in all of the wash drawings tonality is carefully controll in like manner as never to be gratuitously pleasing. The compositions are composite and color is used sparingly; the later work becomes increasingly refined in design.

Perhaps the greatest in quantity interesting question raised by the exhibition is the expansion of Lewis's knowledge of and interest in Asian art. The guile of his atmospheric washes and the emotive punctuation of his freely drawn pictographic characters propose a strong spiritual bond with esthetic ideals of Zen thought

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