Norman Lewis: The Second Transition 1947-1951 A.F.T.U./Bill Hodges Gallery New York October 20, 1994-January 25, 1995

NORMAN LEWIS The Second Transition 1947—1951 A.F.T.U./ Bill Hodges Gallery New York October 20, 1994-January 25,1995 Carl E. Hazlewood Journal of Contemporary African Art • Spring/Summer 1995 NOT LONG AGO, if one i nsi st ed on a ranking posit ion for NORMAN LEWIS among t he f amil iar pant heon of t he New York School , t here mi ght have been t wo r esponses: one bl ank and bemused: Norman Lewis? Who t he hell is Norman Lewis? Or worse, a polit e, sorry, condescendi ng smi l e. But ser i ous crit ical reassessment over t he last few years has increasingl y begun t o sit uat e Mr. Lewis in relat ion t o his peers as someone who cont ribut ed equally t o t hat vi t al sea chanqe in paint inq we have come t o know as ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. N o r m a n Lewis' biography begins 1909 in New York where he was born of West Indian parents. He grew up in a Harlem that teemed with intellectual life and cultural activity. Alain Locke, the African American philosopher, was soon to publish an influential anthology entitled The New Negro in 1925. This was a collection of pictures, poems, stories, and essays that suggested the richness to be found within the black experience. By the time Lewis came of age in New York, writers Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston had begun to make distinctive additions to the American literary canon; and the powerful voices of Paul Robeson and Marion Anderson were moving concert audiences wherever they performed. Jazz, in all its evolving forms, from T h o m a s "Fats" Waller, to Duke Ellington to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker was influencing parallel expressions in the visual arts of African American artists. The outstanding American painter of the era, Aaron Douglas, was creating "afrocentric" murals for the Harlem Branch YMCA, and William H. Johnson was soon to migrate to Copenhagen after winning a H a r m o n Foundation Award for his paintings. It was within this milieu that N o r m a n Lewis began his painting career. In 1933 he worked in Sculptor Augusta Savage's Studio of Arts and Crafts. Not long after that he was accepted into the Federal Works Program of the Works Progress Administration. By 1934, the pre-war era of the New Negro, Lewis was an engaged, enthusiastic participant in such artistic activities as was allowed him as an African American at that time. Alain Locke, in his lectures and essays had suggested that African American artists could find aesthetic power by creating images which referenced their own personal, social, and artistic history. He thought that such images would serve to propel a general acceptance of African Americans as positive and dignified bearers of a rich cultural heritage. Lewis' early figurative and genre work certainly met these criteria. But as his skills grew and his concepts matured, he worried about the need to continually define an ethnic stance through his visual production. The prominent Willard Gallery in New York, which also represented Mark Tobey, David Smith, Ralph Feininger, Morris Graves, and Richard Lippold invited him to join their stable. That same year, 1946, Lewis wrote concerning the pressure to produce "negro" art: For about the last eight years, I have been concerned not only with my own creative and technical development but with the limitations which every American Negro who is desirous of a broad kind of development must face—namely, the limitations which come under the names, "African Idiom," "Negro Idiom," or "Social Painting."' In her fine essay, "Two Worlds: African American Abstraction in New York at Mid-Century," from which the above quote was taken, the historian Ann Gibson details the continuing tensions black artists faced (and still face in varying forms) in having to choose between what she calls "Ancestralism" and "Abstraction," that is, figuration or work acknowledging ethnic or social realities in the first instance, or in the second, an art that opts for freedom of abstract form disciplined primarily by formal precepts...