Norman Lewis was a pioneering figure in American abstraction whose lyrical, atmospheric paintings and drawings brought a distinctly African American voice to the postwar modernist movement. Born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants, Lewis grew up in Harlem, where he developed an early passion for drawing and literature. He studied art informally through the Harlem Community Art Center and the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, and later under artist Augusta Savage, one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

During the 1930s, Lewis’s paintings reflected social realism, depicting urban life and Black experience with empathy and subtle critique. By the 1940s, however, his style evolved toward abstraction, driven by a desire to explore form, color, and rhythm without direct narrative constraint. He became the only African American artist to be included among the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, exhibiting alongside Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Lewis’s mature works, especially like Seascape and Counter Intervention, are distinguished by mist-like veils of color and rhythmic, calligraphic marks that suggest both movement and sound. These abstractions often evoke the pulse of jazz, the patterns of urban life, and the collective energy of social gatherings, motifs he transformed into poetic visual harmonies. In some pieces, faint vertical forms and flickering light recall spiritual presences or processional crowds.

Lewis described his art as an effort to achieve “a language of painting that could express the truth of my own experiences.” Even within abstraction, he addressed issues of race and identity through mood and rhythm rather than overt imagery. His 1960s series, inspired by civil rights marches, for instance, captured the emotional and physical energy of protest through abstract line and gesture.

Lewis exhibited widely in his lifetime, including at the Willard Gallery and in the legendary 1951 “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He was a founding member of the Spiral Group (1963–65), a collective of Black artists including Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, and Charles Alston, who debated the role of Black art during the Civil Rights era.

His work has been the subject of major retrospectives, including Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2015), which reestablished his position as a central innovator in American abstraction. Today, his paintings reside in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Selected Exhibitions

Norman Lewis, Harlem Art Center, NY, 1937-39

Norman Lewis, Harlem Artists Guild, NY, 1936, 1937

Norman Lewis, Willard Gallery, NY, 1949-52; 1954, 1957, 1961, and 1964

The Spiral, Christopher Street Gallery, NY, 1964

Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 1970

NORMAN LEWIS: A Retrospective, Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, NY, 1976

Jus' Jass: Correlations of Painting and Afro-American Classical Music, Kenkeleba House, NY, 1983

Inaugural Exhibition: Selected Works of NORMAN LEWIS, Cinque Gallery, NY, 1988

NORMAN LEWIS: From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction, Kenkeleba House, NY, 1989

Black New York Artists of the 20th Century: Selections from the Schomburg Center Collections, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY, 1999

From Challenge to Triumph: African American Prints & Printmaking, 1867-2002, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Brooklyn, NY, 2003

Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University Art Gallery, MA, 2005-2006

Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY, 2014

Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; traveled to Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; and Chicago Cultural Center, 2015-17

Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, Museum of Modern Art, NY. 2022-23

Norman Lewis: Give Me Wings To Fly, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NY, 2023

Norman Lewis: Works on Paper, Bill Hodges Gallery, NY, 2024-2025