From the
Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945 – 1952
September 12, 2014 – February 1, 2015
1109 5TH
Avenue at 92nd Street
New York,
NY
From thejewishmuseum.org:
Through
select paintings by both artists, this exhibition offers a revealing parallel
view of two key Abstract Expressionists. Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, a woman
and an African American, each experimented with approaches that joined
abstraction and cultural specificity. Their work similarly brims with gesture,
image, and incident, yet was often overlooked by critics in their time.
This
exhibition brings together two New York painters whose works offer unique and
compelling approaches to abstraction. Born one year apart, Lee Krasner (1908 –
84) and Norman Lewis (1909 – 79) shared similar family situations and came of
age in the economic, social, and historic complexities of the 1930s. They
formed their creative identities in the artistic and cultural ferment of New
York City that was to catapult it to the center of the art world after World
War II.
Lee
Krasner was born in Brooklyn to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. She studied
at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. From 1934 through 1943
she supervised a section of the mural division of the Federal Art Project of
the Works Progress Administration. Krasner married the painter Jackson Pollock
in 1945.
Norman
Lewis’ parents were immigrants from Bermuda. His family lived on Lenox Avenue
in Harlem. He studied drawing and commercial design in high school before
joining the merchant marine and sailing throughout the Caribbean and South
America. In the early 1930s Lewis worked with Augusta Savage, the founder and
director of the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem. Like Krasner, he
was a beneficiary of the public-works programs of the Depression years,
teaching art under the auspices of the Federal Art Project.
Krasner
and Lewis reached their mature styles during the 1940s and 1950s. Their works
of these years suggest intriguing parallels. Both painters developed many of
the signature elements of Abstract Expressionism – a rejection of realist
representation; a decentered, all-over approach to the picture plane;
spontaneous, gestural brushwork; and a free use of non-naturalistic color. Both
reveled in the sensual pleasures of design. A key aspect of their experimental
method was the use of line – loose and organic or formal and gridlike. Both
artists also drew upon sources with personal meanings: ancient and nonwestern
art, contemporary music, forms of writing, references to urban life. The
parallel viewing of two innovative mid-century painters offers insights into
both their artistic achievements and this transformative era in America.
