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Lot Essay
Executed in December 1944, Cityscape represents an important crossroads in Norman Lewis’s career between the figurative Harlem Renaissance works of his early career and the Abstract Expressionism of his later years. Ruth Fine explains, “Lewis’s shift from figures that are clearly defined to figures suggested or signified by symbolic references…can be tracked in his work through the 1940s, heralding similar transitions towards incorporating abstraction overall. Two relatively prolific years, 1944 and 1945, are essential to documenting this…By Halloween of [1944], Lewis was depicting caricature-like stick-figures that would come to be one of the prevalent elements in his oeuvre, populating dozens of subsequent works…” (“The Spiritual in the Material,” in Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, p. 38)
In Cityscape, the buildings and people of Lewis’s New York neighborhood are reduced to bold, geometric lines and swirls in ink overlaying a mosaic of broader color fields in gouache. Explaining these “suggestions of tenement geography,” Fine writes of related works, “it is reasonable to believe that Lewis’s Harlem surroundings provided sources for the geometric understructures of this and other seeming abstractions. Suggestions of tiles and slats of wood, of windows and doors, of fire escape diagonals, all combine to affirm architecture as a subject, evident both on canvas and in such works of paper.” (“The Spiritual in the Material,” p. 39) Over the following years, these architectural elements in works like Cityscape would become more and more abstracted in his work; yet, “From 1945 and throughout the following years in which Lewis was viewed as an abstract expressionist, his work was in fact equally rooted in his observations of nature and engaged by the activities and structures of the city.” (R. Fine, “The Spiritual in the Material,” p. 39)
In Cityscape, the buildings and people of Lewis’s New York neighborhood are reduced to bold, geometric lines and swirls in ink overlaying a mosaic of broader color fields in gouache. Explaining these “suggestions of tenement geography,” Fine writes of related works, “it is reasonable to believe that Lewis’s Harlem surroundings provided sources for the geometric understructures of this and other seeming abstractions. Suggestions of tiles and slats of wood, of windows and doors, of fire escape diagonals, all combine to affirm architecture as a subject, evident both on canvas and in such works of paper.” (“The Spiritual in the Material,” p. 39) Over the following years, these architectural elements in works like Cityscape would become more and more abstracted in his work; yet, “From 1945 and throughout the following years in which Lewis was viewed as an abstract expressionist, his work was in fact equally rooted in his observations of nature and engaged by the activities and structures of the city.” (R. Fine, “The Spiritual in the Material,” p. 39)