Norman Lewis: An appreciation

N o r m a n Lewis I n one sense, it's too bad that the recent spring- and- summerlong Studio Museum in Harlem exhibition dedicated to art by Norman Lewis focused, thematicaljy, on his "black" paintings . Whi l e the chance to look at so much of Lewis's work was, itself, a blessing, the public was deprived of the chance to see the full range of this painter's work. Given the art historical obstacles curators An n Eden Gibson, |orge Daniel Veneciano and David Craven apparently aimed at smashing, the show's selfimposed boundaries seemed to create an unnecessary limitation. At the same time, the show was a spectacularly beautiful ex perience . The museum's large center gallery was dominated by several striking black and white compositions from the late 1960s, which were joined by two works dominated by electricallycharged swirling shapes ofyellow, black and white kneaded t ogether to create a creature of color which seems to move with the earth- colored ground. This show also revealed Lewis as a painter who was concerned with the thin line between narration and spectacle; a painting, Passing Storm, 1952, seems at first only about the formal concerns with movement, color and shape that haunted many of his contemporaries. But closer inspection reveals hints of landscape, or perhaps Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration, 1951, nature in movement. It might strike some as strange for me to contend that Lewis was largely concerned with nature. His overt subject matter in many of his named paintings (like many abstract expressionists, he chose to name many works with only numbers, or to leave them untitled), pointed to the urban experience, like Metropolitan Crowd, 1946, or Alabama and Post Mortem (both from I960). Yet even here, Lewis's inspiration emerges from a recognition of the common origin and destiny of all life. This concern accounts, I think, for the aura that surrounds even some of his earliest paintings. Though Lewis started as a socialist- realist painter, we can make too much of this. In one of Lewis's last paintings from this period, an untitled canvas from 1944 (theyear of the Communistled left- wing movement's greatest influence), Lewis portrays five people at a bar. This scene of demimonde figures and their ad mirers could have been lifted from some Lenox Ave. and 125th Street vicinity dive. And yet , even here, Lewis distinguishes him self . His figures seem so much a part of the background that they, like chameleons, blend into their surroundings; figures emerge from the shadows and melt back into them. They are blue, like the night andyellow, like the light that brightens the bar at the painting 's center. It wasn't just the depression that brought Lewis to socialist realism. You could say he came to it naturally. The son of a Barbados- born longshoreman and himself a dock worker and union organizer for the CIO in the 1930s, Lewis was distinguished from some of his contemporaries in the world of New York School modernism by his "authentic" working class credentials . He did more than just paint the life. This was one part of Lewis's character which gave him a certain authority among his artist peers. It is easy to forget just how much the early exponents of the New York School style identified themselves with the thenrising working class and labor movement. Like Ad Reinhardt, Lewis taught at the Communist- sponsored lefferson School of Social Science, an institution located (appropriately enough) in Union Souare, where such prominent intellectuals as W.E.B. Du Bois held classes in the 1940s and 1950s for left- wing garment workers, subway conductors and maintenance workers and longshoremen . At the level of stylistic symbolism, the stoicism, the tshirts , blue jeans and overalls affected by artists like (ackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were, themselves, a kind of homage to a working class labor ethic which became part of the abstract expressionist myth. Whi l e Lewis remained a lifelong man of the left, he found himself in the same opposition place vis a vis the organized left wing movement on aesthetic Questions as did other abstract artists. If modernist...