Norman Lewis was born in Harlem, which at the time of his birth was a predominantly Italian and Jewish neighborhood, with few African American families, an imbalance which made him keenly aware of racial inequality at a very young age. Lewis recognized that he wanted to be an artist when just nine years old. In high school, he studied drawing and commercial design. At age 20, 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. The young artist met the sculptor Augusta Savage who was one of the most important African-American art educators, as well as a renowned artist. 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. Lewis helped to organize the Harlem Artists Guild (1935-41), an organization that fostered opportunities for African-American artists, and focused on political and social concerns of the artists and the greater black community. In addition to tutelage by Savage, Lewis was a student at Columbia University. 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 WPA/FAP 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, "which was considered one of the most prestigious commercial venues for abstract expressionism," 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 (1946). 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.
Lewis's oeuvre demonstrates the ability to simultaneously paint abstractly without renouncing the representational and narrative. Despite the strength of his life's work, Lewis - along with other artists of color and women artists - was excluded from the major studies on Abstract Expressionism such as Irving Sandler's The Triumph of American Painting (1976). Acknowledging the beauty and originality of his work, we can use Lewis as an example to question the racial strictures of art institutions and the artistic canon, recognizing that these bodies furthered the racist prejudices of their time. Lewis was never forgotten within the African-American art community, and he influenced the second generation of black abstractionists. More recent attention has come due to Lewis: in the fall of 2015, two exhibitions, one a joint showing of his art alongside that of Lee Krasner, was presented at New York's Jewish Museum (From the Margins: Lee Krasner/ Norman Lewis, 1945–1952), and the other, the first comprehensive museum overview of the influential artist, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia (Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis). In this regard, we are just beginning to feel the full magnitude of Lewis's legacy and the impact he has and will continue to have on contemporary artists.
Sources: The Art Story Foundation & Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AK
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Bermuda National Gallery, Hamilton, Bermuda
Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC
Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Hampton University Museum, Hampton, VA
The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation, San Antonio, TX
Lafayette College, Easton, PA
James E. Lewis Museum of Art, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, NY
The Museum of African American Art, Tampa, FL
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
Norton Museum of Art,West Palm Beach, FL
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
Source: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery