© The Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Photo…

Norman Lewis

American painter, 1909–1979

BiographyNorman Lewis was an African American painter, scholar, and teacher. He was born in Harlem, New York, to parents who had emigrated from Bermuda. As a young man, he attended art workshops in Harlem before attending Columbia University and studying with Augusta Savage. His early work was figurative and represented African American life, but in the 1940s, he embraced abstraction, developing into an abstract expressionist painter. Lewis exhibited widely, often with other abstract expressionist painters of the New York School, and was highly involved in the New York art community. He was a founding member of the Spiral Group and sought to contribute to the civil rights movement through art.

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