Norman Lewis is much like many other African American artists of his generation. Since their skins were brown, these artists were ignored by the so-called art world, lost and unrecognized.
That is changing now – much too slowly, still – as major museums, collectors and even more folks who look like them are buying their works. Lois Mailou Jones lamented that she was not properly respected as an artist in her lifetime. Artist and art historian David C. Driskell recently agreed when he appeared at a Swann Auction Galleries sale that featured one of his paintings, which sold for less than he commands in private sales that are still lower than they should be.
Now appears to be Norman Lewis’ time. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia is holding the first comprehensive exhibit titled “Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis” of this master of Abstract Expressionism, until April 3, 2016. It features 90 works from the early 1930s to 1970s, along with archival materials.
The exhibit will travel to the Amon Carter Theater of American Art in Fort Worth, TX, from June 4-Aug. 21, 2016, and the Chicago Cultural Center from Sept. 17, 2016-Jan. 8, 2017.
The CBS News show “Sunday Morning” was set up at Swann’s twice-yearly sale of African American art this week to produce a feature on Lewis, with its camera at one point focused on a beautiful painting on a beige background that about five hours later would be the belle of the ball. The feature was said to be scheduled for January.
If you ever see one of Lewis’ signature works, you’ll always remember the style. His most recognizable paintings are spatial, with indistinct figures – sometimes drawn pencil-thin in black – evoking movement.
Lewis was born in Harlem in 1909 and decided early on that he wanted to be an artist. In an interview in 1968, he recalled as a child seeing a woman on the street with her paints and he’d watch her. When he was in his 20s, he’d pass Augusta Savage’s studio in a Harlem basement and see her crafting clay into sculptures. He sculpted in her studio for a while but knew that painting was in his heart.
A political artist, Lewis began his career by painting figurative works about the lives of black people and the racism that stifled them, as many other black artists of the 1930s and 1940s. Then he found his own vision, and the result were his abstract pieces that mimicked movement of people. He never lost his allegiance to black folks, though; he just didn’t think that art could solve social problems, only activism could.
“I felt that (the) kind of protest paintings that I was trying to do never solved any situation,” he said in the 1968 interview. “I found the only way to solve anything was to go out and take some kind of physical action. And that painting, like music, had something inherent in itself which I had to discover, which has nothing to do with what exists, it has another kind of reality. … So that with this kind of awareness naturally you really get with yourself and you wonder what can I say, what do I have to say that can be of any value, what can I say that can arouse someone to look at and feel awed about.”
The first time I saw a Lewis painting was a few years after I started attending auctions some years ago. The sale included about four small pieces and I was sure I would get one of them. That didn’t happen because one buyer with deep pockets came ready to take them all home. I didn’t bother to bid, but one couple tried to go toe-to-toe with him but they were no match. They went home empty-handed.
At Swann, I sat behind a couple who had also come to buy themselves a Norman Lewis painting. It was one of the first, followed by two others that were almost three times the $8,750 they paid for “Untitled (Green and Brown Abstraction).”
“We got the best deal,” said the husband, who with his wife were on a trip through DC and then New York from their home in Virginia. “Everything that sold after sold for much more.”
His wife was the collector, “a rabid fan,” he said during a brief break in the auction. “She’s bringing me along.” This was their first Swann auction, and they’ve been collecting artwork – primarily lithographs of African American artists – for several years.
When the large Lewis painting came up for bids, auctioneer Nicholas Lowry started at $150,000, and the bids began to climb. Near the half-million mark, he faintly heard one of the assistants call out a figure.
“How much? 450. Shout it out,” said Lowry, always the entertainer.
Then $460,000. “Never has such a number caused such an uproar,” he said again to the palpable excitement in the room.
$500,000. “I’ll shout at any number above $500,000.”
$550,000. $600,000. $700,000. $750,000.
“Don’t stop,” he said – stating exactly what we were thinking. “800 is next.”
Someone took the bid – most of them were coming from the phones – and all of us were hoping, waiting for the price to reach $1 million. It did not, and the winner got the painting for $800,000 – it was the highest I recalled at any of the Swann auctions I have attended. In April, Barkley L. Hendricks’ “Steve” sold for $365,000 (including buyer’s premium), a record then. “Cathedral” by Lewis sold for $317,000 at that auction.
We all applauded the $800,000 sale. “Who says auctions can’t be fun,” Lowry said. The final price with the buyer’s premium was $965,000, according to the Swann website.
The price of that painting was the highest, but there were others that made it over the $100,000 mark (with premium):
Romare Bearden, “The Annunciation (1946),” $125,000.
Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture, “Recognition (1970),” $125,000
Hughie Lee-Smith, “Performers (1990),” 143,000.
Barkley Hendricks, “Tuff Tony (1978),” $365,000.
Two paintings with Philadelphia connections were also on sale. A 1960-61 New Orleans festival scene by Roland Ayers sold for $5,500. A 1940 Bernard Goss portrait of Richard Allen, founder of Mother Bethel AME Church in the city, did not sell.
