Untitled

In the 1930s, Norman Lewis had created figurative paintings with a social point of view. During this time Lewis was a member of the Harlem Renaissance, working in the predominately African American neighborhood of New York City from which the movement derives its name. By the early 1940s, Lewis began to question the effectiveness of Social Realism in combating racial prejudice. The demand that the subject matter of artists of color like himself reflect their ethnic heritage represented for Lewis a fruitless aesthetic direction. He also felt that this demand represented a way in which American society stereotyped African American artists.

In canvases like this untitled work from 1947, he pursued an artistic vocabulary in which the activity of painting and its resulting forms were the subject. Evoking the sounds of jazz, the calligraphic lines and colored markings of this painting create a layered web, contained only by a narrow margin along the edges of the canvas. The gestural, all-over flatness of this painting reflects Lewis’s leap to abstraction.