?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
NORMAN LEWIS (1909 - 1979) Many Faces of Legend II.
Oil on canvas, 1960. 1460x965 mm; 57 1/2x38 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; collection of Oral Lovell, Wellesley, MA; thence by descent to the current owner.
Exhibited: Willard Gallery, New York, with the gallery label on the panel verso.
In Many Faces of Legend II, Norman Lewis shows a mid-career shift in his mastery of the Abstract Expressionist idiom. In the early 1960s, Lewis added a new palette infused with saturated, warmer colors. His 1960 paintings also began to include more cultural references, with evocative titles such as Alabama, Rednecks and Evening Rendezvous, that reflected the darker times of the Civil Rights movement, as well as his own personal struggles and a political awareness that manifested itself in his later involvement with the founding of the Spiral Group. Norman Lewis exhibited this painting in his 1961 Willard Gallery exhibition--his penultimate show with the New York City gallery that had shown his work since 1949.
