celebrating two lesser-knowns of expressionism

This fall, the Jewish Museum casts a spotlight on Lee Krasner (1908-1984) and Norman Lewis (1909-1979), two lesser-known artists from the abstract expressionist period, in an exquisite show of some 40 works that runs until February 1, 2015. Titled “From the Margins: Lee Krasner/Norman Lewis, 1945-1952,” the exhibit aspires to highlight the artists’ exceptionalism in a movement dominated by white men.

It has been only six years since the Jewish Museum mounted “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976,” showcasing more than 30 of the period’s leading lights. But Krasner, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, and Lewis, the African-American son of immigrants from Bermuda, were represented in a section called “Blind Spots,” where her “Untitled” (1948) and his “Twilight Sounds” (1947) were displayed side by side.

That pairing, with its “unanticipated synergy,” subsequently inspired the museum to delve more deeply into the lives and works of these neglected painters, whose biographies and artistic vocabularies bore some striking similarities. The result is the current comparative display of their early abstract work, which aims to give Krasner, who was married to Jackson Pollock but overshadowed by him, and Lewis, who was part of the avant-garde circle but overshadowed by the big names, the critical recognition they were denied at the time.

Both were New Yorkers who were born a year apart. They began their careers in the 1930s with the Depression-era arts programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Krasner, who was born in Brooklyn, attended the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union, the Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design before she headed up a section of the mural division of the Federal Art Project of the WPA and embraced social realism.

Lewis was born in Harlem and lived on Lenox Avenue near 132nd Street. He studied art in high school before befriending African-American sculptor Augusta Savage, founder of the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts on West 143rd Street, and attending Columbia University. Like Krasner, he worked for the WPA’s Federal Art Project, becoming a teacher and adopting the style of the social realists. Both favored figurative painting at this time and were influenced by surrealism.

By the 1940s, however, each had come under the sway of abstraction—think cubism and Picasso, expressionism and Kandinsky, and the geometric style of Mondrian. Krasner had experimented with abstraction under the tutelage of German émigré painter Hans Hofmann, studying at the renowned Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Greenwich Village. She even socialized with Mondrian when he was in New York, becoming his “occasional dancing partner,” the show’s catalog states. Lewis, for his part, was an admirer of modernist Vaclav Vytlacil, the influential teacher at the Art Students League who co-founded the American Abstract Artists group in the city to support the acceptance of non-objective art.

The two developed personal approaches to abstraction while at the same time adopting its core principles. They eschewed strict representation and favored gestural brushwork and “all-over” pictures, paintings that covered the entire canvas and had no central focus.

But, in a departure from the prevailing aesthetic of the abstract expressionists, who painted outsized pictures, these modernists turned out smaller, more intimate works that integrated personal histories and experiences. Two series, Krasner’s “Little Images” and Lewis’s “Little Figures,” form the heart of the show and illustrate their distinct methods and preoccupations. The works are exhibited in tandem, playing off one another and continuing the “conversation” started several years before at the museum, when it seemed as if “the paintings of these two had a great deal to say to one another,” director Claudia Gould writes in the catalog.

Krasner, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, was fascinated by calligraphy and Hebrew script and painted from right to left in deference to her training. Her “Little Images” are dense grids, packed with geometric forms and small “calligraphic markings” and pictographs. With “Little Figures,” Lewis also pays homage to line and writing, but he invokes specific imagery based on his cultural experience—images that allude to Harlem streets, African textiles, and jazz—albeit barely discernible references in a thicket of long, sinuous lines. He was a master of linear abstraction.

The use of line was a central element of both Krasner’s and Lewis’s innovative styles, as was their determination to imbue their art with personal significance. But major critics during abstract expressionism’s heyday failed to take their measure, no doubt blinded by Krasner’s gender and Lewis’s race. But that was then.