Norman Lewis: The Tilled Surface, 1935–42 Available to Purchase

Scholarly reception of the abstract expressionist painter Norman Lewis (1909–79) has focused on the overwhelming racist exclusion of the painter’s oeuvre from the canon and sought to construct a vocabulary for his complex practice. Building on this foundational scholarship, this article asks what impact the painter’s significant participation in the Black left (from the 1930s through his late career in the 1970s) had on his art production. Alongside activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Harold Cruse, and Paul Robeson, Lewis participated in a decades-long debate about the role of Black labor in the formation of American capitalism. I show how Lewis’s contribution to this milieu was through painterly experimentation. Long an issue in the interpretation of twentieth-century abstraction more broadly, the trace figurative elements in Lewis’s work—titling as well as narrative scenes—responded not only to his biography or social observation but to the theory and activism of his peers. Specifically, I focus on a series of double-sided watercolors from the late 1930s and early 1940s that mark a moment just before the artist swore off figurative imagery as politically futile. Edging into abstraction, I argue that Lewis’s “tilling” of the painted surface revoked the representation of labor common to social realism. As a manifestation and engaged critique of Du Bois’s employment of historical materialism in his book Black Reconstruction (1935), Lewis’s watercolors posit a formidable role for modernism in the analysis of US racial capitalism.