A line of red and black oil paint circles the surface of Norman Lewis’s Untitled (Red Nude), with blots of color recalling the shape of two seated figures, one perhaps resting their head on the shoulder of the other. Created in 1962, Untitled (Red Nude) reflects an understanding that the pursuit of aesthetic goals will in turn reveal the social significance of one’s art practice. Untitled (Red Nude), like Lewis’s Blue Cloud, 1964, and Ed Clark’s Gray Force, 1972, comes to auction from a distinguished Washington, D.C. collection of work by primarily Black and Diaspora artists.
In 1963, Lewis became a founding member of the Spiral Group, a collective of New York-based artists, including Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Emma Amos, among others, formed in response to the August 1963 March on Washington. The Spiral Group met regularly to discuss the concept of a Black aesthetic, and made art, both figurative and abstract, that directly responded to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.i
Trained as a social realist, Lewis ultimately found freedom to express himself in a more abstract style, where his diaphanous, liquid application of oil to paper produces a rich and emotive effect. “The goal of the artist must be aesthetic development,” Lewis once shared, “and in a universal sense, to make in his own way some contribution to culture.”ii Untitled (Red Nude), as an abstracted exploration, makes such a contribution, and presses against conventional understandings of Black art, and art itself.
