"...One of the discouraging things in my own self-education, was the fact that painting pictures didn't bring about any [social] change."
-Norman Lewis
Career
Lewis began his career in 1930, with mostly figurative work and social realism. He painted with "an overtly figurative style, depicting bread lines, evictions and police brutality." Lewis said he struggled to express social conflict in his art and, in his later years, chose to focus on the inherent aesthetic. He told art historian Kellie Jones that "the goal of the artist must be aesthetic development" to "in a universal sense... make in his own way some contribution to culture."
In the late 1940s, his work became increasingly abstract. His total engagement with abstract expressionism was due partially to his disillusionment with America after his wartime experiences in World War II. It seemed extremely hypocritical that America was fighting "against an enemy whose master race ideology was echoed at home by the fact of a segregated armed forces." Seeing that art does not have the power to change the political state that society was in, he decided that people should develop their aesthetic skills more, instead of focusing on political art.