Stanley Lewis; The Legend

By Amy Misurelli Sorensen

I was amazed to see so many people in attendance at Stanley Lewis’s opening and lecture on February 17. He led a discussion on his retrospective currently on display at the Katzen Museum.

Stanley Lewis comes from a specific school, The New York Art School, where form takes precedence over content. It has a history. It is a very modernist notion and I believed this notion and his work to be dated. I was prepared for the rhetoric to accompany the monotonous display of landscapes presented on the wall. I thought I had Stanley all figured out, and I admit, I went into it half-heartedly.

The audience was a problem. It was a very large crowd. I had a hard time hearing Stanley speak. The fans in attendance fascinated and distracted me with their gaping mouths, frozen smiles, and adoring eyes. What kind of man generates such a large fan club?

Stanley Lewis does.

He stepped in like a breath of fresh air. I found myself engaged with his nonspecific descriptions of process, his humility and honesty to his obsession with paint and paper applications. He is entertaining and I found myself laughing aloud. Finally, someone, an artist, is simply saying it is o.k. to do this art thing, just for the love of it. What a gala and free wine to boot!

On February 19, I witnessed the true genius of Stanley Lewis. Stanley is an admirable teacher. He instructed a drawing class at the National Gallery. After showing the class several Dutch paintings, he recommended we sit and draw from one painting to figure out and reveal its secrets.

I choose to draw from Rembrandt’s “Man with an Earring.” I specifically choose this painting because of the one figure composition and the compelling portrait. Stanley begins to draw along side of me. He eagerly assimilates the larger forms in the planes of the face to their relationships to the planes in the ground. He makes discoveries and shares them with me. I see in Stanley a commitment to figuring out Rembrandt’s formal decisions. I questioned his presumptions, and continued on my own investigation. Then, as I stand and draw from this painting, I have a revelation. Through drawing, I have revealed the analytical rhythm of this painting that is not apparent from first glance. I search through this drawing for two hours, and finally I too figure out the puzzle. I dialogue with the ghost of Rembrandt through my pen and paper.


Stanley’s contagious passion and teachings are a gift. Stanley Lewis is committed, as Picasso was, to figuring out the language of art.

Stanley Lewis, A Retrospective

reviewed by Lauren Rice
American University Museum at the Katzen

If artist Stanley Lewis is anything like his work then he is indeed charismatic, eccentric, passionate, rigidly energetic and obsessive. I have heard for years about Lewis' personality and his work through professors and fellow students, however his current retrospective at the Katzen Art Center has given me my first opportunity to view his work for myself. At first glance, the paintings steal the show, illuminating the gallery with their sugary palette. However, although I am intrigued by Lewis' paintings, it is his drawings that I find extraordinary.

Stanley Lewis' drawings are unlike anything I have ever seen. Lewis' collaged elements echo the nervous energy of Giacometti's lines. If he had not succumbed to so many collaged pieces the drawings would be nothing grand, but their fantastic obssessiveness puts them into a superior category. His obsessively patched paper reiterates his packed compositions that have been ripped apart, scratched out and built back into until they become tactile, sculptural things. Backyard trees become jungles and kitchen interiors become hazardous. There is a violent beauty in his process, destructive and constructive simultaneously. His decision to often leave obvious holes in the paper as touches of light or his choice to show his work unframed is refreshingly confrontational. Lewis has found a way not to feel precious about his marks or his paper. It is just paper, after all. Collage allows him to change anything at all and adds to the overwhelming experience of his world.

The drawings and the paintings in the retrospective begin to speak of movement, fragmented memory and order in chaos. Things in the world are constantly moving and Lewis moves with them, cutting out or building on paper when necessary. One gets the sense that he is searching for truth but knows he will never find it. In fact, the errors and Lewis' search for perfection creates a truth bigger then the frenzy of trying to render without flaw. The collage creates a history, as Bill Willis said, "an archeological dig in reverse."

I like Lewis' paintings for the same reason I like his drawings, for their sculptural quality and Lewis' additive eagerness to change the shape of the canvas if truth or the need for a more interesting composition requires. For some reason, however, the construction of the paintings becomes the focus, as opposed to what is painted on the construction. (Confession: I must admit that this comes from a conversation with someone else. It wasn't my idea first. But I have thought about it seriously and do believe it to be true.) The construction is what is eye-catching and different instead of the way that they are painted. This is similar to the work of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray: I find their work more interesting without the theatrical construction of the canvas. In fact, I feel that it takes away from the work as a whole and the artist's excitement of creating space on a two-dimensional surface. Furthermore, although Lewis' colors often glow with glossy mediums, I miss the thin areas of the drawings that perfectly contrasted to the heavy buildup of paper in other areas. There seemed to be less thinness/thickness contrast in the paintings than the drawings and for this I find them less satisfying. However, I still find him a painter to be reckoned with. The evidence of his work ethic alone is extraordinary and I love that he does not automatically accept the boundaries of the canvas as the boundaries of the painting. There exists a passion in his work that is rarely seen.

Pedagogical Vertigo: The Paintings and Drawings of Stanley Lewis

Tim Campbell

I have not yet met Stanley Lewis, but I felt compelled to write about the work in his retrospective at the Katzen Arts Center because I have recently become aware of his presence hiding behind my education as a painter. While viewing the show, I began to feel as if I had always been receiving his teachings second-hand, via professors who had worked with him or had been taught by him in the past. Mr. Lewis’s presence has been felt at the Art Institute of Chicago, Kansas City Art Institute, Yale, Boston University, the New York Studio School, and American University, among others; he has zigzagged across many of the MFA and BFA programs between Chicago and New York.

My first exposure to Lewis’s work was as an undergraduate; one of his pencil drawings was featured in a show of works on paper at my college art gallery. The same drawing that introduced me to Lewis as an undergrad is featured in his current retrospective. As I viewed and reviewed it last week, I experienced a vivid flood of memories of the exact same chunks of paper and glue, the exact same slashes into the flesh of the parchment block, the exact same cords and tendons of graphite which form such neurotic networks of branches and bramble. These drawings have a very real way of staying in your memory, because they reproduce with passionate detail the parts of landscape that art usually ignores. Lewis is incredibly capable when it comes to bringing life to his work; his edgy lines not only represent the trees he is so engaged in picturing, they become palpable, physical presences that tremble and dance before the viewer.

Much like the paintings of Pollock, this work has a physical strength to it. Physicality of material and the physical manifestation of process are clearly primary concerns for Lewis while he is painting. Unlike Pollock, however, Lewis does not erase every pictorial trace of inspiration, context, or source. He loves light-filled landscapes (there were very few cloudy, stormy or nocturnal pictures), and he is very serious about maintaining a commitment to what can be reproduced from observation. This obsession brings his work close to Giacometti’s portrait paintings. And like Giacometti, the point of these paintings seems to be for the viewer to watch Lewis trying to get it right, trying to capture what he sees in paint. It’s about the process of finding a balance between expressive mark and pictorial responsibility.

While made with incredible skill, pure craft cannot be the only goal of the work because Lewis deliberately staples fresh canvas into his paintings instead of sewing or pasting new portions, which would offer a smoother and less dramatic shift in surface. In addition, he deliberately shows the build-up of obscene amounts of paint instead of scraping the canvas down, washing it, and reworking it. The build-up of paint and the staples have another function, as well: they make the paintings more concerned with honesty than with beauty. Lewis wants to show us how he gets to a finished painting; he doesn’t want to hide his process behind a nice finish or a nice view. This honesty does not allow for a tremendous amount of variety in the paintings, but it is an honesty that I respect.

Sometimes, the paintings do not hold my interest because of the subject matter. The works show a surprising silence when it comes to commenting on the subjects they depict. The places that Lewis shows us are everyday corner stores, chain link fences, backyards and commonplace fields. They are familiar; they do not offer any surprising events buried within this familiarity, nor are they transferred into the world of metaphor or allegory. Since so much attention is spent upon the medium of paint and the process of picture-making, it is impossible to imagine these locations without the presence of Mr. Lewis. His intensity and psyche are necessary components to this work, and therefore he enters into the content.

Overall, the show displays the career of an intense artist obsessed with understanding the landscapes that he finds himself in. The paintings work best when they erupt into energetic fields of mark that compete with the spatial illusions of landscape, and the drawings come across as the stronger works because of how Lewis amazingly maps every single branch of whatever tree he is looking at. The locations found in the paintings are portrayed as they are seen by the artist; that is, as visual information for a painting. The role of these locations, or their greater importance, is left up to the viewer.

If you are interested in seeing the work of a masterful picture-maker whose main concern is the construction of paintings, then this show will be a treat for its spectacular intensity and unusual techniques. If not, then the show might prove to be uninteresting because of the commonplace qualities of Lewis’s chosen vistas. Either way, this retrospective shows the dedication and achievements of a highly unusual and unique landscape artist.

Which recently exhibited artist has been most influential on your work?
	Matthew Barney
	Jasper Johns
	Joseph Cornell
	Stanley Lewis
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