Norman Lewis at the Chicago Cultural Center (September 17, 2016–January 8, 2017)

(Norman Lewis - 1909 - 1979)
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The first big problem for Norman Lewis was that most of the Abstract Expressionist painters were drawing from their cultural capital as white, male and middle class to purportedly create art which was ‘universal’ to the human experience and which gainsaid the concept of gender, economic or racial difference. At that time the white, male, middle class perspective was dominant and taken for ‘universal’ – everybody was supposed to benefit from it and get on board that train (and some black and women artists apparently even tried to get on that train). It was Lewis’s goal, however, to draw upon his experiences as an African American in situations of oppression to create his pieces. His depth of insight coming from struggle and resistance was deeper and, ironically, more universal than that of his buddies in the Abstract Expressionist movement, but he was marginalized due to this orientation.

{{{Early figurative work}}}

Drawing from the black experience in America allowed for a greater type of universalism than the type the white guys falsely asserted that they, themselves, owned, but it relegated Lewis to nearly complete irrelevance among the established and respected critics of the time. Indeed, he is still referred to as, basically, the black guy who was doing Abstract Expressionism when, in fact, the current retrospective show, ‘Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis’, at Chicago’s Cultural Center, would seem to show that he should never have even been characterized as an Abstract Expressionist in the first place. Indeed, that Lewis was not an Abstract Expressionist seemed to be the opinion shared by the curator of the show Ruth Fine in a comment she made at the National Gallery of Art this year.

{{{Early attempt at abstraction - a Jazz Club}}}

The second big problem for Lewis was that wealthy white folks who bought art would often buy what they ‘liked’ and not what had universal or humane meaning. Once, after I wrote a review of an unrelated gallery show, the gallery owner emailed me and bluntly told me that the people who buy pieces from his gallery do so primarily because they like the colors in them. He prayed that potential buyers would not read my review because they definitely would not buy pieces if they realized there were controversial ideas in them. Some wealthy white guy wandering into the Willard Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1950s was probably not going to buy a work that dealt with psychological responses to racial injustice or which referenced the struggle for human rights or racial equality.

{{{Kandinsky-inspired work}}}

Indeed, the range of content and themes in art has been severely limited, historically, due to first the patronage and then the market system. The anticipated taste of art buyers often determines what gets shown and then saved in museums. What the (white, male, affluent) art buyer does not like does not often go very far – this has been a limiting parameter throughout the history of art, especially since the market system took over, and it hurt Lewis severely.

{{{American Totem}}}

The third big problem for Lewis was that in much of his work he made no pretensions to abstract art being a bifurcation from or radically divorced from representational art. Abstract art, to Lewis, seemed to be a continuation or further development of representational art just as, as an analogy, infrared radiation is a continuation of the overall light spectrum. On occasion his pieces seem to be completely non-representational, as in his overt imitations of Kandinsky (seen in his piece ‘Fantasy’), his overtly geometrical pieces of the late 40s which spoke through line and color, his attempts to mirror the rhythms of music in some of his pieces or in his ‘Sea Change’ pieces. (Yet, even in his ‘Sea Change’ paintings you see egg-like or placental images intimating, perhaps, re-birth on a social scale.) That you could often see figures and that the figures sometimes seemed to allude to Klan meetings or cross-burnings or lynchings, again, supposedly limited the universalism that the Abstract Expressionists falsely claimed as their accomplishment.

{{{Alabama}}}

The most interesting experiment I came away with from ‘Procession’ was how Lewis uses the repetition of human figures to create geometrical or organic shapes against contrasting backgrounds. In ‘Double Cross’ we see an image that very well could have been inspired by the phenomenon of cross-burnings with a thick, blackened concentric grouping overlapping an intense fervid background. Figures seem to be running toward the two crosses, creating greater and greater density and overall darkness. 

{{{Double Cross}}}

The power of hatred to awaken the worst in us, and to link us to others as a greater and greater organic mass of blind emotion seems to be implied (and is clearly applicable to a political and social phenomenon which reared its head in the recent American presidential elections). ‘Alabama’ seems to work from the same principle of either a gathering or loosening of social density, in this case the color white possibly representing the color of Klan robes.

{{{Journey to an End}}}

‘Journey to an End’ uses a similar technique as we seem to see one large Klan figure moving forward aggressively in a violent gesture (perhaps throwing something – his arm bent back like the common image of a baseball pitcher just before he brings the ball forward) who is comprised of numerous smaller white figures marching, carrying flags and walking with guns in lockstep.

{{{Ritual}}}

‘Ritual’, on the other hand, presents a mass of smaller human figures in colorful, African-inspired clothing, forming a crescent image below three ambiguous lines against a background of rich and soothing blue. It is as if this group - formed like a bowl or cupped hands - has come together to receive a blessing or higher influence and the implication is that this must happen as a community – a gibe, perhaps, against the lonely, alienated Abstract Expressionists who felt they each spoke for and to humanity from their isolation and individuality.

Bruce Davenport Jr's "Outsider Art" Homage to Mike Tyson at Louis B. James on the Lower East Side

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Bruce Davenport Jr. is considered an 'outsider' artist. These are artists who often have no formal or academic art training, but who have a strong desire to create. Often their work does not look as refined or polished as the work of artists with years of training, but many people like the passion, sincerity and energy of outsider art. The current show at Louis B. James consists of pieces dedicated to Davenport’s childhood hero, Mike Tyson.

The Tyson pieces, to me, not only document the pride that Tyson engendered in a young African American man living in a poor, segregated community in Louisiana, but also provoke questions about the role of the black athlete, and especially the black heavyweight boxer, as a source of pride in a community which still struggles for equality in America. Is there something about a successful African American boxer that gives him special status, above and beyond other types of athletes, as a sports star for his community? What have these great heavyweight boxers (Johnson, Louis, Ali, Tyson et al.) meant to a struggling African American community through the years?  How have the roles of these boxers for their communities changed as America has changed? To what extent is pride engendered through the heavyweight champ’s background and personality, as well as his race? Finally, have these boxing idols been more of a force, ironically, for pacification or, instead, perhaps, for motivation to face and overcome hardship?

Despite the fact that issues of poverty are generally kept out of the news, and racial discrimination and prejudice are often dealt with only after personal tragedy and social protest, many black folks in America clearly still seem to be suffering greatly. 70% of black children are born into single parent homes, black unemployment is twice that of white unemployment, about 9% (1/11) of African American men are in jail, 27% of black folks live beneath the poverty line (46% of black children under 6 live in poverty), the high school graduation rate for African American males is only around 50%, and cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are much higher in the black population than among white folks (just to highlight a few disparities). Under such harsh and adverse circumstances, black role models regularly become a source of pride and hope for those who struggle in the city. In his pieces Davenport regularly writes about the importance of Tyson as a hero. In one piece he writes that Tyson was a blessing. In another he was the black knight on a white horse. Every African American kid in the neighborhood wanted to be like Mike Tyson.

In one of his pieces at Louis B. James, Bruce Davenport Jr. writes below an image of a boxing ring that when a Mike Tyson fight was on TV, the housing project where he grew up became as silent as a church. I loved that Davenport would reference a church and a Tyson fight in, as it were, the same breath. The so-called ‘inner-city black church’ experience has often been maligned by sociologists who claim that it is merely a pacifying and coping agent in the lives of oppressed and suffering people – they argue it reassures people that things are not as bad as they seem, when , in fact, things are actually worse than they seem.  Other sociologists cite positive and motivational aspects of this church experience and claim that the church benefits its members greatly – a source of pride and hope is necessary to one’s survival in adverse and oppressive circumstances. By, however, loosely and subtly equating a quiet housing project during a Tyson fight to a church, Davenport helps also call into question the effect the black athlete has had in the African American community during a time of struggle. The question is asked: Is the black athlete the potential double edged sword (pacifier and/or galvanizer) that the black church might also be? Does the black athlete merely reassure and mollify, or does he motivate and inspire?

Through his writings on the paper on which he has created his pieces, Davenport puts Tyson within the tradition of the very great black heavyweight boxers.  References are made, among others, to Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Mohammed Ali.   Jack Johnson, one of America’s first pop culture superstars, flaunted convention and was ultimately maliciously arrested and imprisoned for a year for allegedly taking a prostitute across a state line for immoral purposes.  Joe Louis grew up in the Jim Crow South, during some of the worst years of lynching, moved to Detroit and became a type of All-American anti-Nazi propaganda weapon. Ali refused military service in Vietnam (‘The white man wants to send the black man to kill the yellow man.’), was nearly thrown in jail for this and was stripped of his heavyweight championship belt for three years during various legal wranglings. Tyson, abandoned by his father, bullied mercilessly as a child, living in a neighborhood of violence and crime, had been arrested over 30 times by the time he was 13.

These various “outsider-art” drawings of Tyson in various bouts throughout his career are affecting and meaningful to me in that they show the need those of us who struggle have to find proof that the system can be beat. The whole game is rigged, but a black guy from Brooklyn who would otherwise be in jail is now on TV with the whole world cheering for his victory. In a situation that could otherwise be hopeless, and lead to despair, the Tysons who defy all odds can raise our spirits and keep us going. The world had abandoned Tyson. But for one kind social worker (Bob Stewart) and one warm-hearted trainer (Cus D’Amato), who saw humanity in someone otherwise abused and discarded, Tyson would be dead or in a cell now. So it’s not just Tyson who is celebrated here. It is the belief that we can’t give up on each other and that we have to forgive and overlook the past and that in this very act of faith in ourselves and each other, we can overcome and transform ourselves and the world.