Feb 16, 2012 - Sale 2268

Sale 2268 - Lot 122

Price Realized: $ 5,280
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
NORMAN LEWIS (1909 - 1979)
Green and Black Abstraction.

Watercolor and ink on cream wove paper, 1951. 485x610 mm; 19 1/8x24 inches. Signed and dated "5-51" in pencil, lower right recto.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; collection of Oral Lovell, Wellesley, MA; thence by descent to the current owner.

By the late 1940s, Norman Lewis's work grew increasingly more abstract, departing from his early work in the 1930s and 1940s that recorded everday scenes and figures in his native Harlem, sometimes in Cubist fashion, to his more complexly abstracted and atsmospheric work of the 1950s. This abstraction typifies his early forays into the figure/ground relationship.