Louis Lozowick
1892–1973

Louis Lozowick worked predominantly in the print medium and was most prolific during the 1920s and 1930s, when he recorded the social reform and industrial growth that took place in America between the world wars. Born in the former Russian Empire (now Ukraine), Lozowick immigrated to the United States in 1906, where he studied drawing and pursued a liberal arts education. During a year spent in the Army Medical Corps, in 1918, he was able to travel cross-country, sketching the industrial structures that would later become the central subject of the prints and paintings of his mature style. Lozowick moved to Europe the following year and, during time spent in Paris, Moscow, and Berlin, absorbed the ideas and techniques of artists of the European avant-garde, especially the Constructivists. “Almost everyone evinced an immediate interest in America,” he later recalled, “not, however, its art but its machines.” Upon his return to the United States in 1924, he would incorporate their views into his vision of industrial America.

Lozowick’s attraction to the geometry of the American industrial landscape is evident in Corner of Steel Plant. The angle of the image, looking up at the steel mill, highlights the power of its presence and the rational order of its structure—the parallel lines of the scaffolding, the grid of the vent, the curves of the pipes. While Lozowick’s lithographs from the 1910s and 1920s depict industrial structures and machine parts, during the Depression his prints became more overtly political and explored themes of labor, strikes, homelessness, and racial inequality.

Introduction

Louis Lozowick (1892 – 1973) (Ukrainian: Луї Лозовик, romanized: Lui Lozovyk) was a Ukrainian-born American painter and printmaker. He is recognized as an Art Deco and Precisionist artist, and mainly produced streamline, urban-inspired monochromatic lithographs in a career that spanned 50 years.

Janet Flint, then Curator of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., wrote in 1982: "Louis Lozowick occupies a premier position among those artists whose imaginations have been touched by the city and its rich variety of architectural forms. In his paintings, drawings, and especially his superb lithographs, Lozowick achieved new aesthetic dimensions in his interpretations of the skyscrapers, smokestacks, elevated trains, and bridges of America. He was a man of diverse interests and talents – historian and critic as well as pioneering artist – whose significant contributions to the art and thought of his age are only coming to be fully recognized".

Wikidata identifier

Q6687709

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Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed December 8, 2024.

Introduction

Known as a Precisionist painter.

Roles

Artist, painter

ULAN identifier

500028616

Names

Louis Lozowick, Lozowick

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Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed December 8, 2024.