A harmonious orchestration of color and gesture teeming with joyous energy, Evening Rhapsody is an exceptional example of the profound brilliance of Norman Lewis’ visionary painterly oeuvre. Painted in 1955, Evening Rhapsody embodies the gestural dynamism that defined the Abstract Expressionist movement, a school of painting of which Lewis was a critical but often overlooked member. Evening Rhapsody brilliantly marries the muscular bravado of Abstract Expressionism with the unique hallmarks for which Lewis has become known: veiled washes of color, organic forms tenuously balanced between abstraction and figuration, and a hushed yet powerful lyricism. Brimming with lyrical improvisation yet restrained by refined articulation, the present composition reinforces the energized spontaneity, contagious exuberance, and gestural bravado suggested by its title. The import of the present work is underscored by its exceptional provenance: Evening Rhapsody remained in the collection of the artist until 1979 when, shortly before his own passing, he gifted the painting to his close friend Wallace Nottage. Wallace then passed the painting to his daughter, double Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage, and it has remained in her collection ever since. Nottage has vivid memories of visiting Lewis’s studio with her family when she was a little girl and recalls: “He had this magnificent cluttered loft, where paintings were rolled up and stuffed in all the nooks and crannies. Not just his own paintings, but also those of others. He was a collector – a collector of ideas, of books and records. He was a great liver.” (Lynn Nottage, quoted in Sotheby’s Magazine, April 15th, 2021, Online)

In the mid-1940s, Norman Lewis abandoned the social realist style that had occupied him for more than a decade and embraced abstraction. Lewis stood as the only African-American alongside the well-known behemoths of Abstract Expressionism, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman, at the historic 1950 symposium at Studio 35 in New York, where the leading artists of the day coined their eponymous term. Unlike his peers, however, Lewis resisted strict categorization, never "arriving" at a signature style, but rather relentlessly exploring new media and motifs, engaging contemporary socio-political issues through both figuration and abstraction, and looking to sources as disparate as the European Modernists, African visual culture, and the early American Ashcan School. Although representational associations had diminished by the mid-1950s, in his mature paintings such as Evening Rhapsody Lewis nonetheless imbues his abstract compositions with a haunting sense of figurative presence; in the present work the pulsing staccato strokes hint at bodies moving in procession through hazy veils of color and space. Despite the symphonic presence and transcendent aura of Evening Rhapsody, Lewis imbues the present work with a subtle yet potent intensity and urgency that reveals his lifelong political activism.

Conflating sumptuous color and blazing light, Evening Rhapsody is a feast for the eyes, engulfing the viewer in a stunning vista of incandescent splendor. Eddies of verdant greens, vibrant yellows, and fiery oranges pool together in watery swathes, the melding of diaphanous veils of color evoking a reflective body of water that recalls Monet’s waterlilies. The accumulated layers of pigment concurrently hover indeterminately as three-dimensional floods of chroma in front of the picture plane, while also reinforcing the materiality of the painted object through the insistence of paint soaked into the canvas weave. The rhythmic progression of color and calculated interplay of complementary and contrasting hues injects a dynamic rhythm to the work, each transition playing across the surface like a sheet of music. Flashes of luminescence emerge from streaks of lush verdant greens and warm ochre yellows, while bars of fuchsia, plum, and scarlet fold into swathes of diaphanous color. Vibrant staccato strokes of pink, red and blue color slide in and out of focus, mirage-like, noticeably present but not yet consolidated into the formal motif of his later work.

A perpetual student at heart, Lewis participated heavily at the Harlem Community Art Center in the 1940s and 1950s, where he met writers, musicians, and artists, including Jack Whitten. Lewis’s constant self-education, which included this engagement within his Harlem community, was supplemented by trips to the Museum of Modern Art, where he viewed the European masters like Vincent van Gogh and Wassily Kandinsky, and a fierce commitment to African-American social causes. Files in Lewis’s studio included everything from color charts, books on art, philosophy, and race, to postcards from his travels, and clippings from TIME magazine, testifying to his broad interests, inexorable curiosity, and myriad inspirations. Although politically motivated, Lewis adheres to a language of abstraction and beauty, which belies a quiet hum of energy. Lewis is quoted as saying: “Art is a language in itself, embodying purely visual symbols which cannot properly be translated into words, musical notes or, in the case of painting, three-dimensional objects, and to attempt such is to be unable to admit the unique function of art or understand its language. The artist must have an idea with which to begin but it must be an aesthetic idea and it must be developed from the unconscious experience, through conscious associations and technical knowledge to become a complete, aesthetic experience for both the artist and the viewer.” (The artist quoted in: Ruth Fine, “The Spiritual in the Material,” p. 99)

Evoking an arresting and stirring aesthetic experience within the viewer, Evening Rhapsody beautifully conveys the soft yet powerful voice and vision of Norman Lewis. One of the most socially engaged artists of the Twentieth Century, Norman Lewis’ usage of abstraction to social and political ends radically differentiated him from his Abstract Expressionist peers. In this way, Norman Lewis’ groundbreaking oeuvre pre-empts the charged abstract landscapes of such artists as Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu, who later use that language of abstraction to create politically engaged artworks.

Sotheby’s Magazine

Playwright Lynn Nottage on Growing Up with the Great Norman Lewis

Artist

Norman Lewis