Norman Lewis, Untitled (Subway Station)

[music]

0:00:05.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Akron Art Museum, looking at a painting by Norman Lewis. This is Untitled (Subway Station). It’s a little bit hard to make out what it is that we’re seeing, but there’s enough here that it makes me feel like I want to spend some time untangling it.

0:00:20.0 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: It’s pretty quick to see that we’re looking at a group of standing figures, but trying to tease out who is who and what exactly they’re doing is surprisingly difficult. Starting from the left, we have the vertical lines of a suit and some buttons. Above that, there’s a profile of a face, and even above that, there’s a horizontal line that maybe suggests a hat. We see the fingers of a hand holding something that looks like maybe a cigar with smoke. Maybe it could even be an ice cream cone.

0:00:48.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: And Just behind that figure’s ear are some protruding horizontals that remind me of the exit turnstiles that exist in New York City subway stations. So immediately, I’m clued into the idea that all of these figures are standing on the platform, and we’re looking across at them. If you look to the right, there seems to be a figure that we’re seeing in profile. And behind that figure is what seems to be a female figure with straight hair, a purple face, and a purple neckline, whose hands are clasped in front of her dress.

0:01:23.7 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: And it’s unclear if the middle figure is kissing the woman or talking with her. It looks like his hand is reaching around and holding her far shoulder, but then we have to ask, is that middle figure separate from the figure on the left, or are they one figure? Is he doing two things at once? Is this not just a moment in time, but multiple moments all being represented in one still image?

0:01:49.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re confronted with the idea that the artist doesn’t necessarily want us to fully untangle this. The artist seems to want that ambiguity and seems to revel in the opening up of form and the multiplication of possibility.

0:02:02.8 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: To have it hover in that place between you know what you’re looking at and you don’t know what you’re looking at is a really active, dynamic place to be, and it’s a balance that Norman Lewis had to strike to get us there.

0:02:14.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: And we see it on the right side as well. Here we see three figures fairly clearly. There’s a standing figure on the right that’s looking slightly to perhaps his right. There’s a standing female figure perhaps wearing a hat, and then there’s a more diminutive figure in the middle. At first, I might assume that’s a child, so maybe this is a family group or maybe not. That’s further complicated by the fact that one of the figures, perhaps the smaller figure, perhaps the woman on the left, is holding what might be a cigarette with a little bit of smoke trailing upward, but there seems to be a lollipop being held by the figure at the right. And so I’m confused, and I think that was very intentional.

0:02:50.8 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: And I don’t really know why there’s a lollipop here because you have this central figure who’s shorter but still has breasts, so maybe it’s not a child. Maybe they’re not actually all grouped together. Maybe it’s the shorter figure standing in front and the other two are together. Who knows what this relationship is? We just don’t have enough information.

0:03:08.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: Notice how the hand that seems to be holding a cigarette is the same yellow as the yellow that’s picked up in one of the bands of the lollipop. There’s just this lovely interaction across the surface. I can’t help but think that we’re actually not standing on the far platform. I have the sense that there’s a kind of rhythm and a kind of energy and a kind of movement that is the result of us being on a moving train, passing by what is perhaps a local subway station where these people are waiting. We’re speeding by, and we’re only catching a momentary glance, and that idea of the momentary, of not being able to fix figures, would have been so interesting to an artist like Norman Lewis, who’s inspired by, has learned from the abstraction of cubism and other avant-garde movements, who’s interested in opening up the possibility of the image.

0:04:00.9 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: I love this idea ’cause if you look across the picture, there are so many horizontal lines of maybe the turnstiles on the left. Behind the right-hand group of figures, there’s maybe the tile wall of the subway. That left-hand figure with the hat, that hat, that horizontal goes way across and then into the hat of the standing, likely female figure. So there’s all these horizontal lines which suggest that horizontal movement of us being on a train and going by this group of figures really fast. And then contrasting against that, you’ve got all of the verticals of these standing figures. And so you’ve kind of got horizontal, which is our movement, our inability to see the details or figure out the scene, fighting against the vertical lines of all these people. So you’re trying to figure out what exactly you’re looking at as you’re, like, flying by and trying to people-watch.

0:04:41.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: And if that’s true, then we’re not just looking, but we’re hearing. I can hear the clickety-clack of the train. I can hear its roar. So there’s something that’s intensely modern, intensely urban about this.

0:04:55.5 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: And I can’t possibly look at this picture, knowing that it’s by Norman Lewis and knowing that it’s from New York in the 1940s, without thinking about jazz music. Lewis had an older brother who was a violin player and a musician and was quickly getting into a career where he played with some really major jazz bands. Lewis was inspired by jazz throughout portions of his early career. But seeing this kind of specific range of colors, where the yellow recurs in different places or blues recur, and a sort of medium tone across most of this picture, and then different sorts of punctuation with the black areas or with detail or with these verticals that make, yeah, a very musical, very syncopated or bopping kind of a rhythm.

0:05:36.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And you could even take that to an almost literal level and see this as a musical staff and see these figures as almost musical notes. And I love the idea of the city itself as music.

[music]

This work at Art Bridges

Ruth Fine, editor, Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, exhibition catalogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

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