“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.”
Rendered with a sublime and poetic lyricism, Snow in the City from 1949 is an early and consummate exemplar from the powerful oeuvre of Norman Lewis. Amongst Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, Lewis was a critical member of the seminal group of artists who inaugurated the Abstract Expressionist movement. An early example of Lewis’s shift from figuration to abstraction in the late 1940s, the present work emerges from a limited group of white paintings the artists executed during these years; this group also includes Harlem Turns White (1955), one of the artist’s best-known works. Articulated in veils of shimmering pigment and delicate, intricately rendered shapes, Lewis’s signature abstract mode is nowhere more lyrical than in the white and silver hues of the present work. Following its execution in the late 1940s, Snow in the City remained in the collection of the artist until 1972, when it was acquired by the present owner.
Norman Lewis: Market Context
The only African American artist present when the group coined their name at the historic 1950 symposium at Studio 35, Lewis was a central figure of Abstract Expressionism but has only recently begun to receive acclaim for his unparalleled contributions. Departing from the Social Realism of the beginning of his career, Lewis began to explore abstraction in the mid-1940s and over the next thirty years actively avoided stagnation. The artist ceaselessly innovated his practice, pulling from a range of visual and literary sources while maintaining a concern for contemporaneous sociopolitical issues. From 2015-2017, Lewis’s work was celebrated in a traveling retrospective between the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and Chicago Cultural Center. Melodic and contemplative, Snow in the City is a rich embodiment of the early corpus of Lewis’s abstractions in which the artist defined a foundational gestural lexicon for the remainder of his prolific career.
An unabating learner and active member of his community, Lewis drew inspiration from sources including European Modernism, African visual culture, TIME magazine clippings, texts on philosophy and race, and current social and political events. Living and working in New York City, Lewis participated in the Harlem Community Center, engaging with artists, writers, and musicians such as Jack Whitten and made many trips to the Museum of Modern Art, where he studied the work of European masters like Vincent van Gogh and Wassily Kandinsky. Lewis’s canvases embody a nuanced examination with these art historical titans as well as a mutual exchange with his peers working in both figuration and abstraction. While the painterly quality of his canvases recalls the fluid forms of van Gogh and his compositions and color palette frequently invoke that of Kandinsky, Lewis’s works also reflect an interest in African sculpture and the cantor of Jazz music, which were influential to him during his Social Realist period. Painted in the same year as his first solo exhibition, held at Willard Gallery in New York City, Snow in the City represents a transformative moment in Lewis’s oeuvre. At this time, Lewis began to diverge from his figurative peers, inventing his own expressive formula, which would soon incorporate the social and racial concerns of his penultimate body of work.
“Abstract Expressionism gave Lewis the permission to chart a third space on the canvas, by creating art that brought the world of nature into the work on his terms. His rebellion was not against the notion that painting should have no relation to what lay outside it, but rather against the traditional discourses of what that relationship should be. He did not want the outside to drive painting, but painting to reconfigure our perception of the external world. His struggle was to assert not only his own aesthetic determination, but also the self-determination of aesthetics.”
Liberating himself from the limitations of figuration, Lewis expanded the possibilities of his practice through abstraction. While his contemporaries in the New York School focused on evacuating the canvas of social and political concerns to emphasize the expressive potential of the painted medium, Lewis would ultimately utilize abstraction to invent new visual techniques to activate complex dialogues on race in America. While the present work predates the politically charged paintings of the mid 1950s and 1960s, in which the terror of the Ku Klux Klan became the central focus, Snow in the City clearly foreshadows the visual techniques that characterize Lewis’s later works.
The kaleidoscopic patterning of Snow in the City entrances the viewer, rhythmically drawing their eyes around the composition. The staccato dashes, energetic lines, and whirling marks of the painting appear almost like music notes on a score, dancing around the canvas; simultaneously, the diaphanous white hue cloaking the composition creates the snowy picture suggested by its title. Each element of Lewis’s composition pulsates before the viewer, generating a total symphonic harmony. Both dynamic and contemplative, Snow in the City is a particularly exquisite example of Lewis’s abstract works.
Despite his critical impact on Abstract Expressionism, Lewis has only recently begun to receive acknowledgement for his immense contribution to mid-century Contemporary art and on forthcoming generations. Lewis’s ability to engage with abstraction and insert powerful messages of social justice foreshadows the works of leading artists today, such as Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu. Snow in the City represents the nexus of Lewis’s career in which he courageously entered into the world of abstraction: “to assert not only his own aesthetic determination, but also the self-determination of aesthetics.” (Jeffery C. Steward, “Beyond Category: Before Afrofuturism There Was Norman Lewis,” Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, Philadelphia, 2016, p. 172) An early and superlative example, Snow in the City is a critically important work of Lewis’s oeuvre that foretells the conceptual program and visual lexicon of the artist’s distinguished career.
