NORMAN LEWIS

(1909-1979)

Untitled (Gathering)
1955

Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired by the present owner prior to 1996


The Estate of Sherman K. Edmiston Jr.
In New York and the art world alike, so much of what we see today is owed in part to a small number of unseen heroic figures who pursued their passions and projects with an energy that carried many with them along the way. Sherman
K. Edmiston Jr. and Essie Green Edmiston were two such people. As individuals they displayed an immense curiosity and sensitivity to the culture and social questions of their community and time; as a couple, their shared devotion to the arts, from their nascent collecting in the 1970s to Sherman's commitment to Essie's namesake gallery after her passing in 2000, was inspirational.

If the Harlem Renaissance can be considered the explosion of cultural production that emerged from the search for a black American identity in the aftermath of the First World War and as African Americans moved north away from the racial violence endemic in the south, the generations that followed in the 1960s and 70s, alongside the Civil Rights Movement, marked nascent shifts in the social and economic spheres as black Americans reached the heights of business, politics and the arts. Ambitious and educated, the Edmiston's patronage and collecting was matched by their business nous that propelled them to becoming one of the city's most respected duos, and Essie Green Galleries one of the most important cultural sites in Harlem's Sugar Hill that has influenced the academic and institutional narrative of twentieth century painting.

Both Sherman and Essie arrived at art through the purest appreciation of their roots and sense of legacy. Moving to the Riverton area of Harlem at the age of twelve, to Sherman the New York City borough represented a special place where the arts, music and black culture thrived – the heart of the community since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Sherman was guided by those people and places in his early life, identifying with their ambition and tenacity, including Dolly King, a former professional basketball player and community leader at the Riverton playground. Sherman graduated high school with an interest in accounting and business, ultimately majoring in engineering at The City College and securing his first job working for the Housing Authority. His early start in real estate enabled Sherman to pursue his collecting from a relatively early age, cultivating his tastes and building a network in the city.

In perhaps one of his most telling anecdotes, recalling meeting Essie for the first time through a mutual friend, walking into Sherman's apartment Essie fixated upon a painting in his living room. Unknowingly, it was a work that she had intended to acquire for herself before Sherman had purchased it from the gallery. The Edmistons were drawn together by their love of art and their belief that one must have courage to invest in the futurity of one's own culture and community, what Essie regarded as the 'black masters.' Sherman nevertheless playfully quipped "she only married me for the painting"; testament to the serendipitous, gregarious, and wonderful union of these two individuals.

After opening their first gallery, Park Plaza Gallery, on the ground floor of their Park Slope home in Brooklyn in 1979 – and meeting Romare Bearden at a fundraising event, whom Essie and Sherman regarded as a mentor and close friend until his death in 1988 – the gallery went from strength to strength. Essie credited Bearden as pushing her to pursue the 'black masters,' laying the foundation for the gallery program that the Edmistons would build over the course of the 1980s, and ultimately leading them to Harlem, opening Essie Green Galleries in 1989 on the corner of 148th Street and Convent Avenue, a brownstone where it remains today. Through Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Sam Gilliam, Charles Alston, Lois Mailou Jones and Bearden, amongst others, the Edmistons built a univocal voice through their gallery and their collecting that will stand as immensely significant, marking an outstanding history of black patronage and community that rallied around the contemporary artists of their day.

Essie and Sherman's pursuit of art was built on the foundational belief in the importance of the black American voice. They were figureheads of a hugely underappreciated second-wave renaissance that took place between the aspirations of the Civil Rights Movement and the flamboyance of New York/New Wave. Presented here are masterpiece examples that evidence the significance of Essie Green
Edmiston and Sherman K. Edmiston Jr. to this movement, not only as gallerists and businesspeople, but as collectors, patrons, friends, and trailblazers.


Norman Lewis, Untitled (Gathering)
Norman Lewis is one of the definitive, visionary painters of the twentieth century. His legacy has crystallized over the decades since his death, whereby any history of Modernism is incomplete without his life and work as a central focus of the post-war period. Untitled (Gathering) is a master painting of superlative quality that demonstrates the uniqueness of Lewis' paint handling, the lure of his radiant compositions, and his significance as an African American artist whose painting and place in New York and the Harlem community was a shining voice that delivered a resounding and inspirational call to break the one-dimensionality of Modernism and art history. In short, his paintings stand amongst those of Pollock, Pousette-Dart and de Kooning as heavyweights of their time, yet beyond the canvas he is a champion of intersectionality and racial equity.

Abstract Expressionism is a broad school, one that has undergone multiple revisions as scholars and institutions seek to better define the true complexity and diversity of the movement that emerged in the 1940s in New York City. There remains, however, an entrenched group of artists who truly defined the most significant artistic development of the twentieth century, captured most potently in the letter submitted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 by the eighteen artists known as The Irascibles. Norman Lewis falls into both these conceptions of Abstract Expressionism. His hugely significant place amongst the first pioneers of the movement is without doubt – one of the key attendees of the historic April 1950 symposium at Studio 35 in New York – yet it has taken many decades for his contribution to be fully appreciated as curators and writers roll back the curtain of prejudice that has positioned African American artists as a footnote to the canon.

From the collection of Sherman K. Edmiston, Untitled (Gathering) weaves a still more wonderful story between two upstanding figures who called Harlem their home and through which their legacy is bound. Edmiston and Lewis shared an unshakeable belief in the power of art and their presence within the industry to initiate and promulgate real change. As artist and businessman alike, they pushed through glass ceilings and epitomized the self-starting, assertive attitudes of the post-war period that began to level the scales for African American leaders emerging in wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Untitled (Gathering), therefore, is a painting that beautifully captures the essence of Essie and Sherman K. Edmiston's project: to lay the foundation, promote the black masters and set an industry benchmark for a community-driven and socially conscious enterprise that would shake the history books from their depthless uniformity.

Born in 1909 in Harlem to Caribbean immigrants, Lewis was an artist who dedicated his life to his art and his community. Whilst he described himself as self-taught – first developing a desire to paint after witnessing a woman painting in the street at around the age of nine – he did nonetheless study under Augusta Savage in his formative years. It would nevertheless be fair to say that his greatest education was owed to his Harlem neighborhood and to the museums of New York, however, both of which provided him with a rich and complex source of inspiration from which his early social realist paintings developed. He captured Harlem as it had been between the wars, troubled after the great depression – oftentimes his subjects heads bowed and dejected – but a glorious melting pot of African American culture that brought a vibrant array of jazz and blues, art and culture right to the very streets of his neighborhood growing up. Throughout his career, it remained central to his vision of what painting and art should be: from life, of life, for life. Lewis remained fastidiously committed to his project, working multiple jobs to sustain his painting, as a taxi driver and elevator operator, and most importantly as a teacher at the Harlem Arts Centre and the WPA Program – a vocation he would continue throughout his life.

A great lover of Van Gogh, Arshile Gorky and Picasso, Lewis was consistently exploring and redefining his practice in the years before his major shift at the end of the 1940s in the aftermath of World War Two. Commenting on the global struggle against the Axis Powers, Lewis regarded the flagrant hypocrisy of a segregated American army fighting an enemy whose oppressive ideologies were built on White Supremacy. It spurned him to fully break from representative painting that he felt was too literalist and closed to offer new avenues of thought, pursuing questions of abstraction and aesthetics that had already started to feed into his practice up to this point. "The figure never truly left Lewis' work, as Untitled (Gathering) suggests a group of figures in quiet movement, reminiscent of the Pont-Aven painter, Paul Serusier's Femmes à la source. Yet, it remained a secondary concern to the artist's regard for painting as a seedling of social change – as it was, his formal development and alignment with Abstract Expressionism would be the most profound and impactful legacy of his career. In period, Lewis was a central figure of the Downtown scene. One of his best friends was Ad Reinhardt, whom he likely met when they were both participating in union activities in the 1930s. Indeed, Lewis introduced Reinhardt to his wife Rita, who was one of Lewis' students. He was represented by the Willard Gallery between 1946 and 1964, one of the most prestigious galleries in New York at the time who showed artists including Anni Albers, Alexander Calder, Richard Pousette-Dart, Mark Tobey and Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva. Over the course of his career he was included in some 130 group exhibitions, though this number is increasing as scholarship on Lewis continues to reveal the immense regard that he held amongst peers and gallerists in period.

Untitled (Gathering) represents one of the most accomplished and beautiful examples of Lewis' painting from a significant year in his practice. In 1955, Lewis was invited to exhibit at the Carnegie International – the oldest exhibition of contemporary art in North America – where he was honored with Popular Prize for Migrating Birds (1954), besting artists including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. "Art is a language in itself," commented the artist, "embodying purely visual symbols which cannot properly be translated into words, musical notes or, in the case of painting, three dimensional objects, and to attempt such is to be unable to admit the unique function of art or understand its language" (the artist quoted in Ruth Fine., 'The Spiritual in the Material,' in Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, Berkeley 2015, p. 99). Lewis had a consummate and studied appreciation of the visual form. This, in part, was undoubtedly owed to his broad love of the arts, absorbed through his Harlem surroundings whose 1920s Renaissance was the defining moment for the borough that Lewis witnessed first-hand. He played piano from an early age, his brother a violinist, and classical music and jazz remained a deeply informative creative language that Lewis referenced consistently in his painting; be it through the quasi-figurative lines that read as musical annotation, the improvisational process or the delicate nuances of color that drift between flat and sharp in a single stroke. Whilst Lewis might rebuke a reading in these terms, the evidence of his visionary and diverse senses is palpable and written across the surface of the present work.

Norman Lewis' legacy as one of the foundational Abstract Expressionist painters has come into clarity in recent seasons with significant force. The scholarship surrounding his practice continues to grow and build a fuller image of the influential nature of his career in period and the profundity of his paintings since his death in 1979, as does his appreciation by major institutions and private collectors alike. After the first posthumous institutional retrospective honored him at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2015, the acknowledgement of a grave historical oversight has rightly seen him regarded as a twentieth century master of the highest order. Untitled (Gathering) from 1955 is a prime example that reveals some of his compelling influences and myriad imagistic sources. Symphonic and resplendent, the present work is a grand testament to a legacy that will unquestionably be the subject of greater scholarship and appreciation as Lewis' place in history develops to its full capacity.