?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
NORMAN LEWIS (1909 - 1979) Oral.
Oil on wove paper, 1962. 1016x660 mm; 40x26 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left, and titled "Oral" in pencil, twice, lower left, center and right.
Provenance: gift from the artist, Roslyn McDonald, New York and Sydney, Australia; thence by descent, private collection, Queensland, Australia.
This work was apparently inspired by Oral Lovell, a painter from Wellesley, Massachusetts who was in a relationship with Norman Lewis in the early 1960s. Ruth Fine notes how Norman Lewis entitled another work on paper Oral II which was exhibited at the Willard Gallery in a group exhibition in 1964.
This paper size is the largest format the artist used for works on paper. It also has the printed Inkweed Arts illustrations on the verso - found on many Lewis works on paper from the 1960s. Fine p. 76, fig. 46 and pp. 260-61.
