NORMAN LEWIS (1909 - 1979) Untitled (Black and Blue Composition).
Blue and black oil on wove paper, 1960. 495x640 mm; 19 1/2x25 1/4 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: the artist; private New York collection.
Norman Lewis used black as a powerful device in a series of abstract paintings from the late 1940s through the 1970s. Despite his friendships with Ad Reinhardt and David Smith, and his New York School associations, Lewis has been overlooked by art historians as one of the pioneer American abstract painters, and one of the first using black as a color. His use of black in the "atmospheric" paintings and works on paper especially in the early 1960s, conveys a metaphorical darkness that is not a void, but an abstract subject in itself.
