Born in Harlem, Norman Lewis was among the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, although he and other African Americans have until recently been excluded from accounts of the New York School. 12 Throughout the 1930s, he was employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Fine Arts Project, painting scenes of the unemployed and destitute. Like many painters in the 1940s, Lewis shifted to a non-figurative style. He became involved with the Abstract Expressionists, exhibiting like many of them at the Willard Gallery in New York and attending discussions at “The Club,” where such figures as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others fraternized. Lewis also served as the first chairman of Spiral, an important group of African American artists organized in 1963 (see no. 25).

Lewis believed that African American artists should devote themselves to seeking universal truths rather than narrowing their focus to pursue ideals of racial or ideological identity. In Green Bough, nebulous clusters are rendered in yellow and green pastels, which emphasize the texture of the paper, and in translucent watercolor, which, applied over the pastel, creates subtle tonal modu lations. Over this is a structure of thin, black lines of ink that taper out into triangular nodes. The effect is that of looking through the leaves of a tree backlit by the sun, but made more universal and transcendent because of the artist’s avoidance of mimetic rendition. As Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson put it, “Lewis’s art focuse[s] on the energies and tensions underlying the abstract forms of clouds, trees, and the sea, revealing in elegant, harmonious and never-overpainted colors the natural unity of earth, sea and air.” 13 In Green Bough, Lewis created a structure which suggests by its form that the process of its making is analogous to organic growth. (MF)