Norman Lewis, a leading African-American painter, was an important member of the Abstract Expressionism movement, who also used representational strategies to focus on black urban life and his community's struggles. Lewis's work is characterized by the duality of abstraction and representation, using both geometric and natural forms, in the depiction of both the city and natural world, and expressing both righteous anger and joyous celebration. His paintings are singled out for their linear, calligraphic lines, along with his bright, expressive palette and atmospheric effects. Unlike other Abstract Expressionists, his technique and content never wholly gave over to the subjective. Often overlooked in art history studies, there has been a renaissance of interest in Lewis's oeuvre since the 1990s.
Lewis ceased painting
Social Realist works in the early 1940s because he found the style was not effective to counter racism. He saw abstraction as a strategy to distance himself from racial artistic language, as well as the stereotypes of his time. Abstraction proved an important means to both artistic freedom and personal discovery.
One marker of Lewis's work is his frequent use of the color black, which appears to predate that of his friend and fellow artist
Ad Reinhardt. However, for an artist who was concerned with race and racism in America, painting during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, it's hard not to see social commentary in his choice of palette.
Lewis garnered important gallery representation and was involved with several key events of the Abstract Expressionist movement, this despite the racism of the art world and American segregation of the 1940s and 1950s.
"...one of the discouraging things in my own self-education, was the fact that painting pictures didn't bring about any [social] change."
Norman Lewis
"When I am at work, I usually remove my state of mind from the Negro environment I live in. I paint what's inside, and like to think of it as a very personal, very individual environment. Being Negro, of course, is part of what I feel, but in expressing all of what I am artistically I find myself in a visionary world, to which 125th Street [Harlem] would prove limited and less than universal by comparison."
Norman Lewis
"...political and social aspects should not be the primary concern, aesthetic ideas should have preference."
Norman Lewis
"I have been concerned not only with my own creative and technical development but with the limitations which come under the names 'African Idiom,' 'Negro Idiom,' or 'Social Painting.'"
Norman Lewis
"I wanted to be above criticism, so that my work didn't have to be discussed in terms of the fact that I'm black."
Norman Lewis
"I used to paint Negroes being dispossessed; discrimination, and slowly I became aware of the fact that this didn't move anybody, it didn't make things better."
Norman Lewis