NORMAN LEWIS (1909 - 1979) Untitled (Urban Composition).
Oil on linen canvas, 1946. 914x508 mm; 36x20 inches. Signed and dated "4-46" in oil, lower right.
Provenance: Bill Hodges Gallery, New York; private collection, New Jersey (1998).
Exhibited: Norman Lewis 1909-1979: 25 Highly Important Paintings, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, May 23 - July, 1998.
Illustrated: Bill Hodges, Norman Lewis 1909-1979: 25 Highly Important Paintings, p. 18.
This modernist composition is a striking, early abstract painting by Norman Lewis. In 1946, Norman Lewis was painting linear figurations with diagonals and curves, bisecting vertical lines and grids - abstracting figures of jazz musicians and the landscape of New York City. This is one of his earliest with its composition isolated on a bright color ground. Ruth Fine included in her catalogue for his retrospective Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis two works on paper with similar compositional elements - Untitled (Architectural Abstraction), 1945, oil, watercolor and ink on paper and Untitled (Polo Lounge), 1949, charcoal and ink on board. They illustrate how an urban setting provided a basis for his abstraction: "it is reasonable to believe that Lewis' Harlem surroundings provided sources for the geometric understructures...Suggestions of tiles and slats of wood, of windows and doors, of fire escape diagonals, all combine to affirm architecture as a subject". In the spring of 1946, Norman Lewis also taught abstract painting at the Jefferson School for Social Sciences in New York. Fine pp. 39, 107, 253.
