Sale 2487 - African-American Fine Art, October 4, 2018

22 c NORMAN LEWIS (1909 - 1979) Untitled (Rural Landscape/Construction Workers) . Double-sided watercolor on cream wove paper, 1943. 355x507 mm; 14x20 inches. Signed and dated ’43 in watercolor, lower left recto (the landscape side). Provenance: the artist; Sarah West, New York; thence by descent to the current owner, New York. Sarah West taught textiles, block prints and metal crafts at the Harlem Community Art Center during the WPA period and was friends with fellow instructors Norman Lewis and Rex Goreleigh. This exceptional double-sided watercolor shows the different locales of Norman Lewis’s work during the WPA period - of the industrial North and the rural South. Lewis taught brief ly at North Carolina A&T State University and at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1938. But he soon returned North, unable to tolerate the segregation of the South. By 1943, Lewis was teaching painting at the new George Washington Carver School in Harlem, where he joined an impressive staff, including Ernest Crichlow (painting), Charles White (drawing), and Elizabeth Catlett (sculpture). Like many of his contemporaries, his experiences in the South continued to inf luence his later work. 1943 was one of the last years Lewis worked with social- realist subjects before moving to abstraction. [15,000/25,000]