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Lot Essay
In his early career in the 1930s and early 1940s, Norman Lewis captured the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance through vibrant, modern paintings of daily life in New York City. As David C. Driskell explains, “At first, Lewis’s art was informed by his personal observations of the lives of the ordinary people with whom he lived and interacted on a daily basis in Harlem. A general overview of the African-American home, ordinary street scenes, and subjects common to urban life became paramount themes in his work.” (“Preface” in R. Fine, ed., Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2015, p. 15)
In Street Scene, Lewis portrays the busy shopping hub at Third Avenue and 153rd Street in the Bronx with bold signage and storefronts advertising the women’s clothing emporium Strickler’s and the C. Ludwig Baumann & Co. furniture store, which were then located at that corner. Lewis was known as an elegant, stylish dresser, and here that focus on fashion is evoked not only through the setting of a shopping mall but through the diversity of elaborate hats and colorful clothes on the figures populating the busy scene. These narrative elements are interpreted through “suggestions of caricature, his use of color to create space and of line to establish a rhythmic counterpoint to color, his blend of surrealist, cubist, color field and geometric tendencies” to create a characteristic figurative style all his own. (R. Fine, “The Spiritual in the Material,” in Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, p. 29)
Although still very focused in a realistic depiction of his community, Lewis’s unique figurative Modernism, as seen in Street Scene, can be seen to provide a philosophical and stylistic grounding for the Abstract Expressionist works of his later career. As Ruth Fine writes of a related work, Meeting Place (aka Shopping) (1941, Private collection, Chicago, Illinois), “And then there is the patterning—dots, stripes, flowers, windowpane squares—that establishes a throbbing surface overall, one that conveys Lewis’s excitement about the possibilities of paint to explore the meaning of life. This sounds clichéd today, but it was essential to abstract expressionists of Lewis’s generation.” (“The Spiritual in the Material,” p. 35)
In Street Scene, Lewis portrays the busy shopping hub at Third Avenue and 153rd Street in the Bronx with bold signage and storefronts advertising the women’s clothing emporium Strickler’s and the C. Ludwig Baumann & Co. furniture store, which were then located at that corner. Lewis was known as an elegant, stylish dresser, and here that focus on fashion is evoked not only through the setting of a shopping mall but through the diversity of elaborate hats and colorful clothes on the figures populating the busy scene. These narrative elements are interpreted through “suggestions of caricature, his use of color to create space and of line to establish a rhythmic counterpoint to color, his blend of surrealist, cubist, color field and geometric tendencies” to create a characteristic figurative style all his own. (R. Fine, “The Spiritual in the Material,” in Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, p. 29)
Although still very focused in a realistic depiction of his community, Lewis’s unique figurative Modernism, as seen in Street Scene, can be seen to provide a philosophical and stylistic grounding for the Abstract Expressionist works of his later career. As Ruth Fine writes of a related work, Meeting Place (aka Shopping) (1941, Private collection, Chicago, Illinois), “And then there is the patterning—dots, stripes, flowers, windowpane squares—that establishes a throbbing surface overall, one that conveys Lewis’s excitement about the possibilities of paint to explore the meaning of life. This sounds clichéd today, but it was essential to abstract expressionists of Lewis’s generation.” (“The Spiritual in the Material,” p. 35)