Painting Outside the Lines: New Shows at the Jewish Museum and EFA Project Space
NEW YORK OBSERVER
By Maika Pollack
NEW YORK---The show “From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945 – 1952,” at the Jewish Museum through February 1, makes the case that race, gender and class identity mattered to American postwar abstraction. The curators call Lewis “the only African-American among the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists”; his family emigrated from Bermuda, and he lived in Harlem where his friends included Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Richard Wright. The paintings, while abstract, do often evoke African textiles, Hebrew script and jazz. [link]
By Maika Pollack
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| Norman Lewis, Lewis Crossing (1949) (Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY) |