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NORMAN LEWIS (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Figurative Abstraction)
.
Oil on linen canvas, 1945. 711x432 mm; 28x17 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: Bill Hodges Gallery, NewYork; private collection, NewYork.
This intriguing, modernist composition is the earliest abstract painting by Norman Lewis to come
to auction. 1945 is the first full year of his foray into abstraction, and his oil paintings from that year
are very scarce. Norman Lewis was painting linear figurations with diagonals and curves, bisecting
vertical lines and grids - abstracting figures in the city.This is what Norman Lewis saw on the New
York sidewalks and subway platforms. Ruth Fine describes in her catalogue for his retrospective
Procession:The Art of Norman Lewis
the urban elements that Lewis used - “it is reasonable to believe
that Lewis’ Harlem surroundings provided sources for the geometric understructures... Suggestions
of tiles and slats of wood, of windows and doors, of fire escape diagonals, all combine to affirm
architecture as a subject.” An earlier 1945 painting, dated January,
Untitled (Subway)
, Michael
Rosenfeld Gallery, shows us a row of figures before he further reduced them to line.
This painting resembles his early abstracted jazz figures from 1945-46 but is even more abstract in the
figuration. Another 1945 painting that the artist was photographed painting is his geometric
Composition I
, in the Thomas Collection, Indianapolis Museum of Art.The painting that is closest in
palette and design is the larger and horizontal
Untitled
, 1946, in the collection of the Studio Museum
in Harlem, depicting a group of several of these figures. Fine pp. 30-31, 39, 44; Kleeblatt/Brown p. 30.
[75,000/100,000]