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Norman Lewis (1909 - 1979) American PREHISTORY, 1952 Oil on canvas Height 25 3/4 inches Width 49 3/4 inches Gift of the James F. Dicke Family, 1996.13 |
The floating, amorphous areas of color punctuated by what appear to be ancient
sea creatures are an abstract evocation of what Norman Lewis saw as
"prehistory." This interest in exploring a time and creating a world that
predates civilization, or perhaps even the emergence of man, was common among
Abstract Expressionist artists such as Lewis. Abstract Expressionism was the
first major American post-World War II art movement and its artists were
immersed in the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Existentialism, and European
Surrealism. Despite the abstract nature of many of the works by the Abstract
Expressionists, content was of vital importance to them. As Mark Rothko and
Adolph Gottlieb stated in a letter to The New York Times in 1943: "There
is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is
crucial." Like his Abstract Expressionist colleagues, Lewis often took his
subject matter from primitive life and cultures, the fascination of which was
expressed by Gottlieb:
Lewis was the only African-American member of the Abstract Expressionist
movement. In the 1930s, he worked in a Realist style with social-realist subject
matter. He taught at a variety of art schools and, like other Abstract
Expressionists, was a member of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) art
program.
Marianne Lorenz
SUGGESTED READINGS:
Norman Lewis: From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction. New York:
Kenkeleba Gallery, 1989.
Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American Painting, New York: Harper and
Row, 1970.
All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the
immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition of the brutality of the
natural world as well as the eternal insecurities of life . . . to us an art
that glosses over or evades these feelings is superficial and meaningless. That
is why we insist on subject matter, a subject matter that embraces these
feelings and permits them to be expressed.
Lewis was also influenced heavily by the work of the early 20th century Russian
master, Wassily Kandinsky. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, now the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, exhibited Kandinsky's work regularly and
mounted a major memorial exhibition of Kandinsky in 1945, one year after his
death. The museum also published his two influential treatises, Concerning
the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane in the late 1940s.
Lewis visited the memorial exhibition and was very attracted to Kandinsky's work
and ideas. The free-flowing lines and amorphous areas of color are Lewis's debt
to Kandinsky's ideas.
