Norman Lewis

Known for his calligraphic and atmospheric abstract compositions, Norman Lewis (1909–1979) was a vital member of the first generation of abstract expressionists. He was the sole Black artist of his generation who became committed to issues of abstraction in an early phase of his career and continued to explore them throughout his lifetime. Lewis’ art was deeply inspired by his musical interests—especially jazz, blues, and classical—as well as nature, ancient ceremonial rituals, and the causes of social justice and equality central to the Civil Rights Movement.

A native of New York City, Norman Wilfred Lewis was born to St. Kitts immigrants Diana and Wilfred Lewis. The family lived in Harlem and Lewis held various jobs throughout his schooling but showed an interest in becoming an artist by the age of ten. In 1929, Lewis found work as a seaman on a freighter and spent several years traveling throughout South America and the Caribbean, meeting local people and witnessing firsthand the poverty of Bolivia, Uruguay, Jamaica, and elsewhere. Upon his return to the United States, Lewis settled back in Harlem.

In the early 1930s, Lewis met artist and educator Augusta Savage, who ran an art school in Harlem and was involved with lobbying the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to hire more Black artists. From 1933 to 1935, he took classes at the Savage School of Arts and Crafts and attended Columbia University Teachers College. In 1935, Lewis visited the exhibition African Negro Art at The Museum of Modern Art, which resulted in a watershed moment for his artistic practice. The exhibition was the first instance in which he observed Black art celebrated by an institutional venue, and he returned several times to sketch the objects on display, producing a body of works on paper that would set him on a path to abstraction.

Lewis’s deep commitment to social and economic equality led him to join the Artists Union, which was organized to protect the rights of artists and workers. Lewis was a regular at 306, a cultural center in Harlem on West 141st Street started by Charles Alston that attracted musicians, writers, and young artists; he was also a co-founder of the Harlem Artists Guild (HAG) in 1935. In 1936, he began teaching art classes under the WPA’s Federal Arts Project. Lewis’ art at the time was grounded in social realism and focused on the experiences of Black Americans. By the 1940s, however, he began to explore abstraction. While he remained active in the struggle for civil rights throughout his life, Lewis was skeptical about the power of art to effect change, explaining in a 1968 interview, “one of the things in my own self education, was the discouraging fact that painting pictures of protest didn't bring about any change.”[1]

In 1945, Alain Locke included Lewis’ work in the exhibition The Negro Artist Comes of Age: A National Survey of Contemporary American Artists. The following year, Lewis joined the growing number of New York abstract artists represented by Willard Gallery, where he had seven solo exhibitions between 1949 and 1961. From his solo show at Willard Gallery through the mid-1950s, Lewis’ reputation steadily grew, and he developed his signature style of calligraphic, fluid forms sometimes suggestive of groups of figures in movement. Traveling in the same circles as prominent abstractionists, Lewis befriended Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Charles Seliger, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. In 1950, he was the only Black artist to participate in the famous closed-door sessions held at Studio 35 organized by de Kooning and Kline and moderated by Museum of Modern Art Director, Alfred J. Barr, which set out to establish a working definition of abstract expressionism. A year later, MoMA included his work in the exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America.

Throughout his career, Lewis pursued his unique artistic vision while also remaining committed to his political beliefs. He was a founding member of the Spiral Group and, from 1965 to 1971, he taught for HARYOU-ACT, Inc. (Harlem Youth in Action), an antipoverty program designed to encourage young men and women to stay in school. In 1969, Lewis joined Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Clifford Joseph, Roy DeCarava, Alice Neel, and others in picketing the infamous Harlem on My Mind show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. That same year, he, Bearden, and Ernest Crichlow co-founded Cinqué Gallery, dedicated to fostering the careers of emerging artists of color. Lewis was also a talented and generous educator and taught at the Greenwich Village Jefferson School and the Art Students League through the 1970s; his admiring pupils included Beverly Buchanan, Mary-Joan Bono, and Francis Snyder. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1972), a Mark Rothko Foundation Individual Artists Grant (1972), and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1975), Lewis had his first retrospective exhibition in 1976 at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY.

Since his death in 1979, Lewis’ work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions. In 1998, The Studio Museum in Harlem presented Norman Lewis: Black Paintings, 1946-1977, curated by Ann Gibson and Jorge Daniel Veneciano. Notable group exhibitions of the past decade include From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis (2014, curated by Norman Kleeblatt) at The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Postwar-Art between the Pacific and Atlantic, 1945-1965 (2016, curated by Katy Siegel and Okwui Enwezor) at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; The Color Line: African American Artists and the Civil Rights in the United States (2016, curated by Daniel Soutif) at Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; Abstract Expressionism, curated by David Anfam for the Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom (2016); Art of Rebellion: Black Art of the Civil Rights Movement at the Detroit Institute of Arts (2017); Blue Black, curated by Glenn Ligon for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2017); and Ten Americans: After Paul Klee at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC (2017). His work was part of the major exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which was organized by the Tate Modern, London in 2017 and traveled to venues throughout the United States until 2020. In 2018, Lewis’ work was on view in the large-scale exhibition Histórias Afro-Atlânticas at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, Brazil, as well as Peindre la nuit (Painting the Night) at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France and Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York, NY. In 2019, Lewis was featured in “Cry Gold and See Black,” a curated selection by Julie Mehretu as part of Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.

In 2015, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) organized Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, his first comprehensive museum overview. Curated by Ruth Fine, this landmark survey was accompanied by an award-winning monograph featuring new scholarship from Fine along with essays by David Acton, Andrianna Campbell, David C. Driskell, Jacqueline Francis, Helen M. Shannon, and Jeffrey C. Stewart. On March 20, 2016, CBS Sunday Morning celebrated this exhibition with a feature anchored by correspondent Jim Axelrod.

Since 2020, Lewis’ work has been featured in the major group exhibitions Black Histories, Black Futures, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2020); Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2020); Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020); In American Waters: The Sea in American Painting, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2021); Creating Community: Cinque Gallery Artists at the Art Students League of New York (2021); Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (2021); The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures, The New York Public Library, New York, NY (2021); and A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence, The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (2021); For the Culture, By the Culture: 30 Years of Black Art, Activism, and Achievement, Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ (2022); and In the Streets: Urban Experience and Identity in the Art of the United States, 1893-1976, organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil (2023). In 2022 – 23, a major painting by Lewis was included in the landmark exhibition Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present, curated by Thomas J. Lax at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. In 2023, Lewis’ early social realist work was included in the exhibition Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, while his work from the civil rights era was featured in Black Artists in America: From Civil Rights to the Bicentennial at Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, TN. In 2024, curator Adrienne Edwards included Lewis’ work in the exhibition Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has championed the work of Norman Lewis for over twenty-five years. Lewis’ paintings and works on paper were an integral part of the gallery’s celebrated annual African American Art: 20^th Century Masterworks series (1993–2003), and they have been the subject of five solo shows: Norman Lewis: Intuitive Markings, Works on Paper, 1945-1975 (1999), Norman Lewis: Abstract Expressionist Drawings, 1945-1978 (2009), Norman Lewis: Pulse, A Centennial Exhibition (2009), Norman Lewis: A Selection of Paintings & Drawings (2016), and Norman Lewis: Looking East (2018). Pulse, Abstract Expressionist Drawings, and Looking East were each accompanied by catalogues featuring original scholarship. Given Lewis’s centrality to shaping the contours of abstract expressionism, his work was also essential to the gallery’s 2011 exhibition Abstract Expressionism: Reloading the Canon. In 2023, the gallery presented a retrospective of Lewis’ works on paper, an expansive body of work in its own right, with Norman Lewis: Give Me Wings To Fly, which was accompanied by a catalogue with new scholarship by Ruth Fine.

Norman Lewis is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums and institutions, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; Art Galleries at Black Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Bermuda National Gallery, Hamilton, Bermuda; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; The Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; The David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA; Harlem Art Collection, New York State Office of General Services, Albany, NY and New York, NY; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; John L. Warfield Center of African and African American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art, Utica, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE; Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, England; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Norman Lewis.

[1] Oral history interview with Norman Lewis, 1968 July 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/lewis68.htm, accessed February 2009