The Brooklyn Rail

At last, a show devoted to Norman Lewis’s graphic work. As with many artists, the delicacy and subtlety of Lewis’s drawings are often overshadowed by the greater density, larger scale, and inevitably more potent tactility of his paintings. However, this show’s exclusive examination of the artist’s drawings (and paintings on paper) permits viewers to focus on the smaller field as well as on Lewis’s technical experimentation and virtuoso draftspersonship. Of course, this is in addition to the finesse of the highly controlled, yet expressive, personal markings Lewis developed in response to this chosen medium.

The exhibition surveys the range of Lewis’s graphic work from 1935 to 1978, the year preceding his death. Sensitive to the requirement that drawings be displayed with adequate spacing, the show offers a well-selected collection that is representative and satisfying without becoming exhausting. The earliest works include a series of figurative drawings that record the seduction and challenge of the forms of West African sculptures that Lewis encountered in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1935 exhibition African Negro Art. This inevitably served as self-identification and validation for Lewis’s own Afro-Caribbean background. Other groupings show examples of drawings that relate directly to Lewis’s distinct painting series—from architectural abstractions of buildings in his Harlem neighborhood from the mid to late 1940s, for example Untitled (1945), up to the late “Seachange” series, with its swirling circular forms, expressive of the dynamic movements and implied sounds of the sea.

Though Lewis is mostly considered an Abstract Expressionist and is aligned with that movement, his work rarely dissolves into “pure” abstraction. Rather, most of Lewis’s art after the mid to late 1940s holds abstraction in deep tension with representation, as if the two are so inseparable that the space between them starts trembling. At the very least, Lewis’s works in the Rosenfeld exhibition allude to the natural world and its human inhabitants. Sure, one thinks of Pollock’s and De Kooning’s expressionist figurations—“abstractions” if you will—from the early 1950s, or for that matter Beauford Delaney’s distinct, yet simultaneously produced portraits and pure abstractions.

But the tensions Lewis engineers and the ideas he appropriates in both his drawings and paintings remain things apart. In fact, Lewis is unusual in conveying microscopic (at least invisible to the naked eye) as well as telescopic situations including celestial, cosmic energies like sound and light. His painting captures the felt properties of phenomenological energies and evokes specific atmospheric sensations that together provide an ineffable feeling of space rather than the specificity of place. Misty Morn (1960) and Peep of Morning (1961) offer excellent examples. While the sfumato character of these drawings virtually liquifies representation, like Constable’s celebrated yet modestly-scaled studies of clouds, they capture the seemingly unrepresentable, ineffable feeling of moisture and mist. The pared down Untitled (1974) offers only a hint at what it might represent: a nightscape, seascape, or landscape consisting of a horizontal rather than vertical zip. This image makes one think of the works of his colleague and contemporary Barnett Newman, but Lewis creates a visual sensation that translates into physical affect and illusive image.

Lewis’s painting Every Atom Glows (1951, collection MFA Boston, not in exhibition) suggests in both title and painterly expression his deep investigation of a particulate nature that was invisible before the then-recent invention of the electron microscope. Modern technology permits us to examine this tiniest building block of the universe, but such visibility also implies the atom’s attendant energy—certainly a subject of endless thought and discussion during America’s atomic age of the 1950s and 1960s. If there is one work in Lewis’s oeuvre that captures visual vibration of infinitesimally tiny microscopic potential, this is it. In Night Orbit #3 (1960) at Rosenfeld, by contrast, he captures an entirely different, more laconic dynamism in which objects or particles seem to levitate aimlessly beyond the Earth’s atmosphere as its title suggests. The potential tension within each object has been obliterated by the spatial vacuum in which it floats.

Lewis’s search is largely phenomenological and physical—unlike works by most of the better-known Abstract Expressionists that attempt to capture an interior and highly personal psychic state. Although Lewis’s exploration is more tangible, in this exhibition I am particularly drawn to his minimal black and white drawings from the late 1940s and early 1950s. These come as close to pure abstraction as any other works in Lewis’s oeuvre. While Untitled (1949) implies, however fleetingly, figures set into a space that is seemingly as flat as its sheet of white paper, Lewis’s arrangement of figural scribbles still implies a three-dimensional configuration.

The whoosh-like marks dispersed throughout Untitled (1953), however, can only be read as pure abstraction. If they signify anything, it is energy, whether by their singular draftsperson-like gestures or through whatever micro- or macro-physical visual allusion Lewis was channeling. The idea of dynamism and the sources of various types of energy were pervasive in the many conversations about these phenomena during the postwar atomic and space age. But Lewis’s ability to imply various states of energy through his highly controlled mark-making is unique.