Corner of Steel Plant
1929

Louis Lozowick’s lithograph Corner of Steel Plant is a tribute to industrial efficiency. For the artist, there was beauty in what might be considered an unromantic subject: the cylinder of a tank set above a corner of the rectilinear grid of a factory, the whole composition unified by a counterpoint of tubular pipes and duct work. Lozowick’s inspiration to represent the urban American environment came to him while living abroad in the early 1920s. Impressed by the order, precision, and rationality of European avant-garde art movements such as Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and de Stijl, he assimilated some of their ideas, developing his own machine age aesthetic upon returning to the States. The mechanical quality of his preferred technique, lithography, dovetailed perfectly with his industrial subject matter and technological optimism, and he praised “the range of tone which it makes accessible to the artist—from the softest, most delicate grays to the deepest, richest blacks, which are given a specific, textural quality by the surface of the stone.”