Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 16, 2016

‘Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis’
By James Panero

On the artist who bridged the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the New York School, on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through April 3, 2016

‘Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is impossible to see without experiencing multiple emotions. The first is exhilaration, over Lewis’s artistic vision; his command of materials, color and line; and the freshness he brings to our art-historical understanding. The second is regret, over what has been to this point our general ignorance of a singular American artist; more than 35 years after his death in 1979, Lewis is only now receiving his first full retrospective. The third emotion is frustration, over the forces that have long conspired to keep Lewis from greater attention—a specific bigotry that goes beyond race to an unspoken prejudice against artists who dare to work outside of expected limits. “Almost forty years after his death,” curator Ruth Fine writes in her richly documented and provocative catalog, “Norman Lewis’s art continues to challenge conventions of painterly practice on many levels, and to remain under-known.”

 

 

Born in New York to Caribbean immigrants in 1909, Lewis bridged the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the artists of the New York School with an innovative and largely self-taught style. With the conscience of a social realist, he came to paint as an Abstract Expressionist, drawing inspiration from a circle of artists that included both Romare (“Romy”) Bearden and Ad Reinhardt. Such boundary-crossing did not go down well in his lifetime. It still doesn’t. By art critics and his fellow black artists, Lewis was often considered insufficiently focused on the realities of the street. But he was also seen by the wider art world as being less than fully engaged in the innovations of the downtown scene.

Now with 90 works assembled from both public and private collections, Ms. Fine makes the case that Lewis, in fact, fully inhabited both worlds. He did not just move from one to the other. He interwove sources and styles in a hybrid way that deserves special recognition, as in “American Totem” (1960), a white-on-black abstraction of Klan hoods. “A true Harlemite,” in the words of artistJack Whitten, only Lewis could also occupy a seat at the table for the closed-door conversations of the Abstract Expressionists in the Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 in 1950.

Lewis cast a wide eye from the very start. The most revelatory comparison comes early in the exhibition, covering a period when Lewis made weekly visits to the Museum of Modern Art. A set of four pastels, from 1935, are realistically rendered still-lifes of African masks. “Fantasy,” painted just a year later, captures both the abstract technique and musical spirit of Kandinsky.

Using bleeds of color cut through with black marks, Lewis applied this Kandinsky-like style to his street scenes, such as the lively “Hep Cats” (1943) and visions of destitution and police brutality, which brought him early acclaim. Yet two years later, he abandoned overtly recognizable imagery, and the subject matter that was expected of him as an uptown artist, to pursue abstract experimentation.

It wasn’t that he lost his commitment to racial issues. Rather, he believed that protest was better demonstrated on the picket line, which he joined for racial causes, than through his paintings. “Political and social aspects should not be the primary concern; aesthetic ideas should have preference,” he proclaimed.

His art is therefore “difficult to describe in summary fashion,” Ms. Fine concedes. “Its development neither followed a linear path, nor ever arrived at a single signature style.” This is now made all the more apparent through an exhibition that brings his full range together. For some, the result may further complicate his reputation. It is true that Lewis’s art, and abstraction by black artists in general, has recently received some important museum attention. Yet the fact that this current exhibition, according to Ms. Fine, was turned down by multiple venues in New York, Lewis’s hometown, speaks to a continued prejudice against artists who refuse to be siloed. New York’s loss is Philly’s gain. This show, which includes a side exhibition of Lewis’s printmaking in PAFA’s famous Frank Furness building next door, will go on to Fort Worth, Texas and Chicago.

At PAFA, the exhibition begins and ends in a lobby filled with Lewis’s monochrome paintings from the late 1960s on. This large-format work emerged after he moved from Harlem to a loft on Grand Street in 1968. The yellow “Afternoon” (1969) feels like a bucolic idyll. The red “Confrontation” (1971) beside it could be a fiery Klan rally.

In these paintings of calligraphic marks and washes of color, Lewis captured very different moods. In each, he found a “spaciousness that began with acceptance of the sky and the distancing sea,” as Bearden once observed. Diaphanous forms and scrims of color swirl like a fog, distancing us from the ant-like figures in his compositions. For Lewis, this remove from oppressive realities liberated his work. Whatever their subject matter, his paintings reveal there is no color barrier to transcendence.

Mr. Panero is the executive editor of the New Criterion.

Martha Martha Martha

"Embattled Garden," here performed by Lorenzo Pagano, Mariya Dashkina Maddux, and Lloyd Mayor of Martha Graham Dance Company; photo Christopher Duggan

How often should we expect the Martha Graham Dance Company to perform dances by Martha Graham? I might suggest something like 75 percent of the time. Founded by Martha Graham in 1926, here is the oldest dance company in America. Tasked with preserving and transmitting the repertoire of 181 works that Graham left behind at her death in 1991 at age 96, the company now offers the only means, for the most part, of seeing the dances of our most influential American on the modern stage. Yet over the finale weekend at Jacob’s Pillow Dance in Becket, Massachusetts, the number of Grahams by Graham stood at just 25 percent. Only one in four dances on the program was a Graham original, while the remaining work consisted of new commissions that ranged from the Grahamesque to the Grahamdiloquent.    

Things started off well with Graham’s own “Embattled Garden.”  Premiered in 1958, the dance reimagines the Garden of Eden as a fiery ménage à quatre among Adam, Eve, a serpentine “Stranger,” and Lilith, Adam’s first wife in midrashic literature. Explaining the program, Ella Baff, the Pillow’s Executive and Artistic Director, here celebrating her final season as head of the festival, called the work “vintage Graham” and jokingly asked, “Who needs reality television when you have high art?” She also reminded us of Graham’s own ties to the festival, since Graham herself had once studied dance at Denishawn with the Pillow’s founders, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, whose portraits flank the barn-like stage of the Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theatre.  

There is an unmistakable “vintage” quality to vintage Graham. Today Graham dances can seem arch and overly expressionistic. Graham’s father studied mental disease, which might explain the epileptic quality to her movement that gets mixed in with long periods of stasis. Often, only some of the dancers are in motion on stage while the others strike a pose from the sidelines. Her music wasn’t always by the great Aaron Copland, either. For “Embattled Garden,” the bombastic score by Carlos Surinach is more MGM than Mahler. Its performance at the Pillow was made even worse by the recording, which sounded like a warped, out-of-circulation LP. (Without a live orchestra, dance in general needs to be mindful of the overamplification of recorded music.)

Despite these shortcomings, the set by Isamu Noguchi, unearthed from the Graham vault, was something else entirely that set the tone for the performance overall—a bold, tactile wonder unlike anything else now seen in dance. It was unmistakable Noguchi, just as this was unmistakable Graham—dance that seeks out the “communication and contemplation” (Noguchi’s words) between person and object. Color plays a bold role in the performance’s overall expression, something unfortunately missing from the black-and-white recordings that exist of Graham on stage, intensifying the mood and placing the work in an otherworldly, mythological light.

For this full effect we must see Graham in person, and at the Pillow, which I saw over a Saturday matinee, her Company delivered. Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch as the haughty Lilith and Lloyd Knight as the slithery Stranger descend from Noguchi’s tree to vex Abdiel Jacobsen’s self-flagellating Adam while making a woman out of Mariya Dashkina Maddux’s Eve. “Martha always wanted to leave behind a legend, not a biography,” wrote Graham biographer Agnes de Mille. Here is a Graham legend of Biblical proportion.

Martha Graham Dance Company in "Depak Ine"; photo Christopher Duggan

Regrettably the next dance up, “Depak Ine,” choreographed just last year by Nacho Duato, attempted to take on its own “essential systems of being—of life, death, decomposition, and rebirth,” but lacked Graham’s modernist rigor. Instead we got smoke machines and mood lighting set to a techno beat. Mouth-pulling and other forms of pseudo-lunacy dominate this ponderous cirque du fou that only picks up at the eventual “rebirth” of dancer Ying Xin, who for a lifetime, it seems, had lain dead on stage.

Ben Schultz and PeiJu Chien-Pott of Martha Graham Dance Company in "AXE"; photo Morah Geist

The third dance, “AXE,” by Mats Ek, was a light pas de deux with more pas than deux, and almost worked. Commissioned by the Festival, the dance begins with the rear curtain opening to reveal what appears to be a wooden backdrop but is, in fact, the back wall of the Shawn Theatre. Pillow stagehands humorously deposit a pile of wood mid-stage—a task that would be prohibitively expensive should this ever be performed in New York under the work rules of Local One. Dancer Ben Schultz then gathers some big rounds from the pile, rolls over a chopping-block stump, lifts up his axe, and for the rest of the performance beautifully splits the rounds into wedges. The action of this dancer performing a manual labor recalls the history of the Pillow itself, as Shawn’s dancers helped build the original campus. Among the chopping, PeiJu Chien-Pott appears as a fluttering moth or woodsprite perilously unnoticed by the woodsplitter. The setup is great, but the engagement between the two never comes together—or splits apart like the wood under that axe.

Abdiel Jacobsen of Martha Graham Dance Company in "Echo"; photo Christopher Duggan

The final piece, “Echo” by Andonis Foniadakis, also from 2014, was the most successful of the program’s contemporary offerings. Foniadakis plays off the classical myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his reflection, by using two male dancers, on my day danced by Lloyd Mayor and Lorenzo Pagano, as a mirrored pair. Pagano was especially engaging as the reflection, smirking and at times reaching out to Mayor’s Narcissus as though pulling him into the water. I found their engagement to be more memorable than the relationship between Narcissus and Echo, danced by Chien-Pott as the nymph who loves him but can only repeat what he says. Yet the corps was brilliantly deployed as blue ripples, spinning out Narcissus’s watery reflection in flowing skirts by Anastasios Sofroniou. 

It could be argued that each of these three contemporary dances, based in myth, had a Graham-like component, but should they all be shown at the expense of Graham herself? After Graham’s death, the Graham Company went through a very public legal battle to gain control of her dances from her designated heir, nearly going out of business in the process. It would be a shame to think it was all destined for the Company vault. Under the direction of Janet Eilber since 2005, the Graham Company has followed what has become conventional wisdom in arts administration by actively pursuing new work. One may think Graham doesn’t fully translate to the world of contemporary dance. Without seeing more of her work on stage, we might never know otherwise.    

Ted Shawn Theatre; photo Christopher Duggan

This Week: The Hall of Fame for Great Americans

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans (all photographs by James Panero)

James writes: 

With the reopening of the High Bridge, now is a great time to explore the beauty of the Bronx. You heard right. The Bronx contains some of the most picturesque, historic, yet overlooked sites in New York. One day recently I biked across High Bride and north up University Avenue through Morris Heights to the the nearly forgotten architectural wonders of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans and Gould Memorial Library, both designed at the turn of the last century by Stanford White, located at Hall of Fame Terrace and Sedgwick Avenue. 

Atop a promontory overlooking the Harlem River, here was once the site of the uptown campus of New York University. When a financially distressed NYU consolidated in downtown Manhattan in 1973, Bronx Community College took over the campus and stewardship of these two architectural landmarks.   

 The Hall of Fame was the idea of Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of New York University from 1891 to 1910. He saw to the construction of a 630-foot curving open air colonnade lined by the bronze bust of its honorees, organized among American statesmen, soldiers, jurists, and writers, with identifying statements from each included on commemorative plaques beneath them.

Inspired by "Ruhmes Halle," built near Munich by the King of Bavaria, in addition to Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon in Paris, this was America's original "Hall of Fame" and the one that led to the many others around the country in sports and entertainment.

 Ninety-eight busts are included in the Hall of Fame, with 102 Americans elected to receive the honor since 1900. Unfortunately inadequate funds have prevented the creation of busts for honorees Louis Brandeis, Clara Barton, Luther Burbank, and Andrew Carnegie. Meanwhile the election of new honorees has ceased while any available resources now attend to the upkeep and maintenance of the existing statues and architecture.    

 

The portrait busts are among the best collection of statuary in the country, with sculpture by Daniel Chester French, James Earl Fraser, Frederick MacMonnies, and others. 

The Hall of Fame was designed to wrap around the back of the original campus buildings, with Stanford White's Gould Memorial Library at the center, and the name of the former owners inscribed above.  

Bronze doors now lead onto a rickety revolving door and stairwell.

 A coffered ceiling above the stairwell only somewhat prepares you for what's inside. 

 

The celestial dome in the heart of the building, thankfully preserved and recently restored, offers a stunning final stop for any visit to this forgotten architectural wonder of the Bronx.