# Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

> 1 upcoming show at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Uptown NYC, including “Norman Lewis: Jumping Jive”. Showtimes, tickets, and directions.

- Section: [NYC Art Galleries](https://bronder.nyc/gallery/index.html.md)
- Address: 100 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10011 ([Google Maps](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Michael+Rosenfeld+Gallery/@40.7461585,-74.0083675,19z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c259c7755c1df9:0xa225e2505d45e426!8m2!3d40.7461711!4d-74.0078111))
- Neighborhood: Uptown
- Web page: https://bronder.nyc/gallery/galleries/michael_rosenfeld.html
- Markdown: https://bronder.nyc/gallery/galleries/michael_rosenfeld.html.md
- Last updated: Nov 04, 2026 at 10:27 AM

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## Norman Lewis: Jumping Jive

- When: On view through Nov 14
- Run: Sep 10 – Nov 14, 2026
- Source: https://michaelrosenfeld.com/exhibitions/norman-lewis-jumping-jive

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present Norman Lewis: Jumping Jive , the gallery’s seventh solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Norman Lewis (1909–1979). Featuring paintings and drawings representative of Lewis’ over four-decade career, the exhibition highlights the vital role music—from jazz and blues to classical, pop, and reggae—played in the artist’s life and practice. An important thematic and conceptual throughline in Lewis’ oeuvre, music appears in early figurative depictions of bands and jazz clubs, in later abstract compositions that variously recall music notes or pulsing soundwaves, and in titular references to songs, lyrics, or musical icons. As Lewis increasingly embraced abstraction in the mid-1940s, the intuitive, riff-based method of jazz composition guided his approach to painting. This focused survey of Lewis’ diverse body of work not only evidences the inspiration the artist gleaned from music but also reveals how his understanding of its power as a universal language enriched and sustained his relentless pursuit of artistic expression. The exhibition takes its title from the earliest work on view, Jumping Jive (1942). Featuring five musicians framed by brushstrokes that seemingly reverberate off the players and their instruments, the painting is exemplary of Lewis’ early representational style and is a reference to the 1939 hit by Cab Calloway, Frank Froeba, and Jack Palmer titled Jumpin' Jive . As Lewis moved from social realism towards abstraction, the figures that once populated canvases such as Musicians (1943) dissolved into the dynamic linework seen in works such as Street Musicians (1948). Painted in 1966, Untitled (Players Four) is a later variation on this familiar theme in which bold swaths of color serve to loosely and lyrically define the bodies of four musicians. Working in a non-representational style for most of his career, Lewis created a robust oeuvre that consistently reflected the sights and sounds that defined his life, including the music he listened to, his natural and urban environs, and the American Civil Rights Movement. Music is also key to understanding Lewis’ approach to abstraction, as he was greatly influenced by the improvisational nature of jazz. In works on paper from the 1950s, stylized, calligraphic lines suggest the spirited syncopations of up-tempo music or the rhythmic beating of bird wings. Paintings from this era feature staccato brushstrokes and pulsing, atmospheric compositions. Reflecting on the dynamic quality of Lewis’ work, critic Henry McBride wrote: "There is a temptation to think the artist a musician as well as a painter for he starts in softly on the blank page like a musician improvising and as he sees a suitable motif taking shape, swings into it with confidence, plays it up for what it is worth and then, satisfied he has gone the whole way with it, permits it to fade softly out." [1] Lewis often directly acknowledged his indebtedness to specific songs or albums in his titles. As is the case with many of Lewis’ titles, Double Cross (1971), a painting that shares its name with a 1968 album by jazz saxophonist Hank Crawford, encompasses multiple, evocative meanings. The title is both literal and symbolic, describing the two central crosses embedded in a fiery ground that recall the burnings carried out by the Ku Klux Klan while simultaneously speaking to the sense of betrayal felt by Black Americans as the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement waned. In Lewis’ 1970s Seachange paintings and works on paper—a series whose title is derived from a phrase first sung by Ariel in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11)—several dominant threads from the artist’s career converge: his synesthetic tendencies, his reverence for nature, and his commitment to fighting for civil rights. Featuring an echoing, ovoid motif inspired by Lewis’ 1973 trip to Greece to visit Jack Whitten on the island of Crete, the Seachange series evokes the movement and sound of crashing waves and serves as a metaphor for the artist’s hope for societal change in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the latest works on view, Ode to Duke (1977), is a resounding tribute to the spirit of music legend Duke Ellington and a reflection of Lewis’ ability to emulate the expressive power of music. Rendered in deep blue and inky black, the work echoes the emotions of one of Ellington’s biggest hits, “Mood Indigo” (1930), and belongs to Lewis’ 1970s body of blue and black paintings and works on paper. On this important series, curator Ruth Fine noted: