Norman Lewis: Seeing the Rhythm

Norman Lewis, Jumping Jive, 2026. Installation view, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Music was immediately present at the opening of Norman Lewis: Jumping Jive at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. When I returned to Chelsea last weekend, I spent more time with the paintings. Bringing together work from across Lewis’s career, the exhibition follows his enduring interest in jazz, blues and other musical forms. The gallery also plays recordings from his own collection. It is an inviting way into the work: you hear something before stopping in front of a painting, and its movements begin to look different.

I lingered over Aspiration (1966). Against a broad field of orange-red, blue, violet, white and black forms gather in some places and break off abruptly in others. Certain movements recur without settling into a regular pattern. There is a rhythm to see, but the painting offers no beat for the eye simply to follow. With music in your ears, that difference becomes especially interesting. Lewis uses colour and marks to make proximity, interruption and distance visible. There is no need to guess at a particular melody.

Lewis (1909–1979) belonged to the first generation of Abstract Expressionists in New York. Music mattered deeply to him, but it was one interest among others: nature, social struggles and the expressive possibilities of abstraction also occupied his work. Jumping Jive is strongest when it allows those interests to remain open. The paintings do not gain their force by looking like jazz. They gain it from the visual language Lewis developed—one that music can help us approach without fully explaining.

This is Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s seventh solo exhibition devoted to Lewis. The gallery represents his estate and has spent decades exhibiting and researching his work. That sustained attention is itself part of the story of New York’s gallery scene: it gives visitors a chance to encounter an artist beyond a single celebrated painting. My second visit changed one thing in particular. I listened more closely, but I also saw where the paintings took a path of their own. Norman Lewis: Jumping Jive remains on view through 14 November 2026.

Exhibition: Norman Lewis: Jumping Jive, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 100 Eleventh Avenue, New York. 10 September–14 November 2026.

Norman Lewis, Jumping Jive, 1942. Installation view, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, 2026. Photo courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

A selection from Norman Lewis’s record collection in Jumping Jive, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, 2026. DJ Adrian plays records from the artist’s collection at the gallery on Saturdays. Photo courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

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