Watercolor and ink on cream wove paper, 1951. 485x610 mm; 19 1/8x24 inches. Signed and dated "5-51" in pencil, lower right recto.
By the late 1940s, Norman Lewis's (1909-1979) work grew increasingly more abstract, departing from his early work in the 1930s and 1940s which recorded everday scenes and figures in his native Harlem, sometimes in Cubist fashion, to his more complexly abstracted and atsmospheric work of the 1950s. Green and Black Abstraction, a watercolor with ink that closely emulates the dry brush application of his oil paintings, evidences his early forays into the figure/ground relationship, espoused and championed by the art critic Harold Rosenberg who famously coined the term "Action Painting" in reference to the Abstract Expressionists.
While not achieving the same success as his contemporaries, who operated in a similar abstract idiom, Lewis did win the important Carnegie Institute prize in 1955 and has since received recognition as one of most important African-American Abstract Expressionists.
