36

Norman Lewis

(1909-1979)

Untitled (Exaltation).

Oil on canvas, 1951.
Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
50 x 27 in. (127 x 68.6 cm.)

  • Provenance:
    Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
    Private collection, New York.

  • Exhibited:
    African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, II, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY, February 1 – April 8, 1995. (label)
    Exultations: 20th Century Masterworks by African-American Artists, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA, June 3 - August 20, 1995. (label)
    Norman Lewis: Black Paintings, 1946 - 1977, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, April 1, 1998 - September 20, 1998. (label)
    Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, November 13, 2015 - April 3, 2016 (traveled to Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Museum, June 4 - August 21, 2016; Chicago, IL, Chicago Cultural Center, September 17 - January 8, 2017).

  • Literature:
    Harold B. Nelson, Richard J. Powell with halley k. harrisburg, editor. African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, II, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and the Thorner Press, New York, 1995.
    David Craven, Ann Eden Gibson, Lowery S. Sims, Jorge D. Veneciano. Norman Lewis: Black Paintings, 1946 - 1977, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, 1998, pl. 19, p. 35.
    David Acton, Andrianna Campbell, David Driskell, Jaqueline Francis, Helen M. Shannon, Jeffery C. Stewart, with Ruth Fine, editor. Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in association with the University of California Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2015, p. 76, p. 183.

    Untitled (Exaltation) is an exceptional example of Norman Lewis' early abstraction, an important painting and the pinnacle of his first abstract period. Lewis found his creative breakthrough in describing the nocturnal urban landscape of New York City within his black paintings.

    Lewis's vision of the city came from outside his studio window or on late night walks in Harlem. Joan Murray Weissman, who was Lewis's partner from 1946 to 1952, recalled: "He really loved night: he loved going out at night, and he loved walking at night, and he loved the sky with stars in it, and he loved lights. He was a night kind of guy.' Beginning with such paintings as Tenement, 1948, Lewis found his abstract compositions in the colored rectangles of illuminated windows, set against the black ground of the darkened city. In City Night, 1949, collection of MoMA, Norman Lewis further condensed the abstraction of New York tenements into a denser, more organic grid that is less literal, and is bisected with lines representing cloth or power lines strung between buildings.

    The next year, Lewis's Cathedral, 1950, collection of the Tate Modern, represents a further exploration of color and composition with its soaring, dense vertical structure and rich colors that evoke stained-glass windows. That year, with his friend Ad Reinhardt, Lewis participated in the Artists' Sessions at Studio 35, three days of round-table discussions, moderated by Robert Motherwell, sculptor Richard Lippold and MoMA curator Alfred H. Barr, in an attempt to define the relevant issues for Abstract Expressionism. The dapper Lewis had arrived and was finally at the table. However, he was the only African American artist to participate and was the only artist to raise the issue of how they should relate their practice to the outside world. Lewis's abstraction reflected this self-awareness.

    By 1951, in addition to his well-received solo exhibition at the Willard Gallery, Lewis began to achieve greater public recognition. That year he was included in the important group exhibition, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York where his 1950 painting Urban hung alongside works by Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Man Ray. Lewis's abstract expression also reached a new height in Untitled (Exaltation) where he deftly found the balance between non-objective painting and a subject for his abstraction. Its beautifully woven lattice of colored brushstrokes lyrically evokes the rhythm of the city at night. Its painterly, serpentine passage up the canvas lifts the viewer; one finds the exaltation in Norman Lewis's city of light.
  • Condition:
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October 7, 2025 12:00 PM EDT
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