?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
NORMAN LEWIS (1909 - 1979) Untitled (Abstract Composition).
Oil on wood panel, 1947. 335x457 mm; 14x18 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right recto. Signed and inscribed "139 West 125 Str. N.Y.C. #27. Price - $150.00." in ink on paper tape, upper left verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, New York; private collection, Chicago; thence by descent to the current owners. The original owner, now deceased, took private art lessons from Norman Lewis in Harlem as a young woman. They remained life-long friends after she moved to Chicago. She received several small works as gifts from the artist in addition to the large oil on canvas she purchased from him (see sale 2323, lot 22.)
This modernist oil painting is one of the earliest abstract paintings by the artist to come to auction, painted in the first full year of his work in abstraction. By the fall of 1946, Lewis had begun a new series of urban abstracted forms, as found in Metropolitan Crowd in the Delaware Art Museum, and Twilight Sounds, 1947, in the St. Louis Museum of Art. This horizontal band of densely drawn figures is similar in composition to his paintings Crossing and his second Jazz Musicians, both of 1948, with their suggested Cubism.
