Painting, like music, had something inherent in itself which I had to discover and which has nothing to do with what exists, it has another kind of reality.— Norman Lewis [1]
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present Norman Lewis: Jumping Jive, the gallery’s seventh solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Norman Lewis (1909–1979). Featuring paintings and drawings representative of Lewis’ over four-decade career, the exhibition highlights the vital role music—from jazz and blues to classical, pop, and reggae—played in the artist’s life and practice. An important thematic and conceptual throughline in Lewis’ oeuvre, music appears in early figurative depictions of bands and jazz clubs, in later abstract compositions that variously recall music notes or pulsing soundwaves, and in titular references to songs, lyrics, or musical icons. As Lewis increasingly embraced abstraction in the mid-1940s, the intuitive, riff-based method of jazz composition guided his approach to painting. This focused survey of Lewis’ diverse body of work not only evidences the inspiration the artist gleaned from music but also reveals how his understanding of its power as a universal language enriched and sustained his relentless pursuit of artistic expression.
The exhibition takes its title from the earliest work on view, Jumping Jive (1942). Featuring five musicians framed by brushstrokes that seemingly reverberate off the players and their instruments, the painting is exemplary of Lewis’ early representational style and is a reference to the 1939 hit by Cab Calloway, Frank Froeba, and Jack Palmer titled Jumpin' Jive. As Lewis moved from social realism towards abstraction, the figures that once populated canvases such as Musicians (1943) dissolved into the dynamic linework seen in works such as Street Musicians (1948). Painted in 1966, Untitled (Players Four) is a later variation on this familiar theme in which bold swaths of color serve to loosely and lyrically define the bodies of four musicians. Working in a non-representational style for most of his career, Lewis created a robust oeuvre that consistently reflected the sights and sounds that defined his life, including the music he listened to, his natural and urban environs, and the American Civil Rights Movement.
Music is also key to understanding Lewis’ approach to abstraction, as he was greatly influenced by the improvisational nature of jazz. In works on paper from the 1950s, stylized, calligraphic lines suggest the spirited syncopations of up-tempo music or the rhythmic beating of bird wings. Paintings from this era feature staccato brushstrokes and pulsing, atmospheric compositions. Reflecting on the dynamic quality of Lewis’ work, critic Henry McBride wrote: "There is a temptation to think the artist a musician as well as a painter for he starts in softly on the blank page like a musician improvising and as he sees a suitable motif taking shape, swings into it with confidence, plays it up for what it is worth and then, satisfied he has gone the whole way with it, permits it to fade softly out."[2]
Lewis often directly acknowledged his indebtedness to specific songs or albums in his titles. As is the case with many of Lewis’ titles, Double Cross (1971), a painting that shares its name with a 1968 album by jazz saxophonist Hank Crawford, encompasses multiple, evocative meanings. The title is both literal and symbolic, describing the two central crosses embedded in a fiery ground that recall the burnings carried out by the Ku Klux Klan while simultaneously speaking to the sense of betrayal felt by Black Americans as the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement waned. In Lewis’ 1970s Seachange paintings and works on paper—a series whose title is derived from a phrase first sung by Ariel in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11)—several dominant threads from the artist’s career converge: his synesthetic tendencies, his reverence for nature, and his commitment to fighting for civil rights. Featuring an echoing, ovoid motif inspired by Lewis’ 1973 trip to Greece to visit Jack Whitten on the island of Crete, the Seachange series evokes the movement and sound of crashing waves and serves as a metaphor for the artist’s hope for societal change in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.
One of the latest works on view, Ode to Duke (1977), is a resounding tribute to the spirit of music legend Duke Ellington and a reflection of Lewis’ ability to emulate the expressive power of music. Rendered in deep blue and inky black, the work echoes the emotions of one of Ellington’s biggest hits, “Mood Indigo” (1930), and belongs to Lewis’ 1970s body of blue and black paintings and works on paper. On this important series, curator Ruth Fine noted:
[The blue and black works] introduce new ideas and forms while also pursuing the juxtaposition of opposites that characterized Lewis’s work throughout his life. Engaging the visible and imagined worlds, they conflate the richness of painterly means with the lyrical patterns of calligraphic markings, and explore the subtlest possibilities of color. Both canvases and works on paper encompass the range of universal emotions, responding to the charge of a humanist at work within the visual artists’ milieu.[3]
With gossamer lines that float like musical notations over a resonant field of sound, Ode to Duke embodies Lewis’ career-long pursuit to translate the universalism he felt in music into a visual form.
Accompanying the display of Lewis’ art are selections from the artist’s record collection of nearly 500 titles. Saved by his family and recently archived and cleaned for study and play, Lewis’ collection reveals the scope of his musical interests, which ranged from Johann Sebastian Bach to Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, and Joni Mitchell. The artist’s collection is notable not only for its breadth—it encompasses bebop, blues, classical, disco, funk, reggae, and soul as well as poetry by T. S. Eliot, Australian sing-along “favourites,” and a 1967 spoken word recording by civil rights leader and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—but also for its depth: the artist owned sixteen Duke Ellington records, the largest number by far of any artist within the collection, followed by eight records from the 1940s by vocal pop group The Ink Spots and seven by jazz musician Eddie Harris. The earliest record in the collection is a 1920 recording of “Whispering” and “The Japanese Sandman” by the American dance band Paul Whiteman and His Ambassador Orchestra, and the latest records were released in 1979, the year the artist died. Lewis’ record collection echoes his artistic trajectory, reflecting his interest in foundational classics, the seismic effect jazz had on both music and midcentury visual artists, and his embrace of the proliferating styles and genres that mirrored the way in which he constantly riffed and built on his earlier work.
- [1]Norman Lewis, quoted in Archives of American Art Oral History Interview with Henri Ghent on July 14, 1968.
- [2]Henry McBride, ARTnews (1951), quoted in Thomas Lawson, Norman Lewis: A Retrospective (The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, 1976), n.p.
- [3]Ruth Fine, ed., Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in association with University of California Press, 2015), 89.
