Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis at the Jewish Museum

On November 7th I went to the Jewish Museum, located on East 92nd street on Fifth Avenue. Going into the museum, I did not really know what to expect or what I was going to see. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised. I walked to the second floor and looked around aimlessly, nor really knowing where to start or what to focus on. A woman approached me and told me that she was going to be leading a tour of the exhibit on the floor so I joined the tour group. I couldn’t help but feel out of place because all the people in the group were old Jewish women speaking Hebrew, but this feeling soon subsided. Perhaps even more so than my visits to the Museum of the City of New York or the Guggenheim, the Jewish Museum took me on a journey. I was taken on a tour of the main exhibition being shown at the museum, which was of the artwork of Lee Krasner(wife of Jackson Pollack) and Norman Lewis(of the Harlem Renaissance), two impressionist era artists. Whoever the tour guide was, she was obviously quite learned in the history of these two artists. It was remarkable to learn about how Lee Krasner, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, and Norman Lewis, raised in Harlem as the son to immigrants from Bermuda, were linked across their completely different cultures into an artistic unity. Experimenting with geometric abstraction, thick and thin paint layers, depth perception, and creative framework, Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis conveyed a distinct sense of their New York City origins and their evolution from modest realism in their early years to more formless compositions later on. There was a visible usage of lines, vertical and horizontal, throughout both artists’ pieces. They seemed to be very versatile in their skill set, as the exhibit showed their progress from early self portraits all the way to the complicated mosaic pieces of Krasner and the blackboard etchings of Lewis depicting a jazz band, shown below.

 

I liked the fact that the tour guide was asking us questions and getting the group involved instead of just lecturing. At the end of the tour, she told us it was her pleasure to have spoken about the artists and their connection to the rich Jewish tradition of New York City, but really the pleasure was all mine in simply listening to her presentation.