Oil on canvas, 1941. 914x616 mm; 36x24 1/4 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left recto. Titled in pencil, upper stretcher bar verso.
Provenance: the artist; William Charles Hinkley, V, New York; Sylvia Wolf, New York; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York; Joyce Wein, New York; the estate of Joyce Wein, New York; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York (2006); John Axelrod, Boston (2006); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2011).
Exhibited: Kenkeleba Gallery, New York; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York; Syncopated Rhythms: 20th Century African American Art from the George & Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University Art Gallery, November 18, 2005 - January 22, 2006, with the gallery labels on the frame back.
Illustrated: Patricia Hills and Melissa Renn, Syncopated Rhythms: 20th Century African American Art from the George & Joyce Wein Collection, p. 71 (titled Shopping).
This colorful Norman Lewis painting is the first of his WPA-era oils to come to auction, and is an excellent example of his work in social realism. With this vivid but sensitive depiction of lady bargain shoppers, Norman Lewis combines his interest in social subjects with a growing modernist approach in the early 1940s. In the mid-1930s, Norman Lewis had been teaching art at P.S. 139 and working under the auspices of the WPA at the Harlem Community Art Center, and briefly in 1937 in North Carolina. Norman Lewis painted other images of everyday women during the Depression, including Dispossessed (Family) and Two Women Reading, both 1940, and both in the Harriet and Harmon Kelley Collection of African-American Art, San Antonio.
