Untitled (Nude Sketch)
Norman Wilfred Lewis (created by)
circa 1940 – 1945 (Date manufactured/created)
pen, brown ink
cream wove paper, drawing / sketch
Signed “Norman Lewis/OBI” by the artist’s widow, Ouida Lewis, in ink lower right. Provenance: Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York; with the labels on the frame back; private collection, New York. Illustrated: Norman W. Lewis: Works on Paper, 1935 - 1979, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, p. 60. Born in Harlem in 1909 to parents from Bermuda, Norman Lewis lived and worked in New York most of his life. He first studied art during the Harlem Renaissance with sculptor Augusta Savage, becoming a painting instructor at the Harlem Community Art Center during the WPA. During the Depression he focused on realist subjects, shifting to figurative abstract work and jazz themes in late 1930s and early 1940s. By the late 1940s he transitioned to more non-objective work. In the late 1950s and early '60s he restricted his palette to the color black for a series of paintings. This nude sketch, produced in the 1940s, demonstrates Lewis’ ability to work abstractly without renouncing representational depiction. Perhaps one of a page of drawings taken /torn from a sketchbook, this drawing reveals his skill in classical full-length representation. Here, Lewis varies his line from bold contour to cross-hatched shading. The model’s bent knee and slightly twisted torso breaks from a static presentation and provides compositional movement from a hidden hand in the background to a resting foot at front. Lewis was an active supporter of African American artists. He helped to organize the Harlem Artists Guild in 1935, an organization that fostered opportunities for artists and focused on political and social concerns of the greater black community. In 1963 he was a founding member of Spiral, a New York based group of African American artists (primarily painters) started in 1963. Spiral focused on protesting social injustice and how race factored into the mainstream art world's interpretations of the work of black artists. A work by theonly female member of the group, Emma Amos, is included in our collection, see: http://www.mattatuckcollections.org/objects-1/info?query=mfs%20any%20%22emma%20amos%22&sort=9&page=5
Museum Purchase, Acquisitions Fund, 2020
2020.2.1