Louis Lozowick

Louis Lozowick (1892 – 1973) (ukr: Луї Лозовик) was a Ukrainian-born American[1] 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.

Louis Lozowick
Born1892
Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine, then Russian Empire
Died1973
New Jersey, USA
EducationKyiv Art School, National Academy of Design (New York), Ohio State University
Known forPainting, Printmaking
Notable workPittsburgh (1922–1923), Detroit (Urban Geometry) (1925–1927)
MovementConstructivism, Precisionism, Art Deco
SpouseAdele Turner

Early life

Lozowick was born in Ludvynivka (Makariv district), in the Kyiv Oblast of Ukraine (then Russian Empire) in 1892 to Abraham and Mary (Tafipolsky) Lozowick.[2] His parents moved to Kyiv when he was young, and he attended Kyiv Art School before he immigrated to the USA, where he continued his studies at the National Academy of Design (New York) and Ohio State University. In America, Lozowick became fluent in English, in addition to his native Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish.[2]

Career

From 1919 to 1924 Lozowick lived and traveled throughout Europe, spending most of his time in Paris, Berlin and Moscow. In the mid-1920s he started making his first lithographs. During this period he contributed an article to Broom which was very appreciative of Veshch-Gegenstand Objekt, by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg.[3]

Tanks #1, 1929, lithograph
Lower Manhattan, 1936, lithograph

By 1926, when he joined the editorial board of the left-wing journal, New Masses, he was well-versed in current artistic developments in Europe, such as Constructivism and de Stijl. These hard-edged, linear styles, evident in a lithograph called "New York (Brooklyn Bridge)," suggest the possibility of an efficient reframing of the world, as did the political theories espoused in New Masses. A version of this lithograph was planned as a cover for New Masses that was never published.

Lozowick was highly interested in the development of the Russian avant-garde and even published a monograph on Russian Constructivism entitled Modern Russian Art.[4]

In 1943 Lozowick moved to New Jersey where he continued to paint and make prints. The human condition remained a constant theme of his art, and an ongoing interest in nature appears more frequently in his later works.

The art critic for The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, wrote a highly positive review of the exhibit "The Left Front: Radical Art in the 'Red Decade,' 1929-1940" at New York University's Grey Art Gallery in 2015 which included work by Lozowick. Schjeldahl wrote "…the aesthetic zest of sheer modernity leaks through in the work of such artists as the Ukraine-born Louis Lozowick, a still underrated virtuosic precisionist. His elegant lithograph "Construction" (1930), showing work on a New York street, with a cutaway view of stacked wooden supports underground, is formally inventive and feels celebratory."[5]

In Aspects of American Printmaking, 1800-1950, Sinclair Hitchings[6] wrote, "Are there such things as American Master Prints? Most certainly there are -- by Joseph Pennell, John Sloan, John Marin, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Louis Lozowick, Martin Lewis, Rockwell Kent, Reginald March, Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Raphael Soyer, Yaruo Kuniyoshi, Stow Wengenroth, and Ivan Albright, among others. The outpouring of prints in the United States after 1900 constituted a major artistic happening, one that will be duly chronicled in histories of printmaking in times to come."[7]

Personal

Lozowick passed away in the Orange Memorial Hospital, in South Orange, New Jersey.

He married Adele Turner in 1933 and moved a few years later to South Orange, where their son Lee Lozowick was born on November 18, 1943.[8]

See also

References
  1. Hagelstein Marquardt, Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (1998). Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick. Print Quarterly Publications. p. 103.
  2. Current Biography: Louis Lozowick. 1942. p. 40.
  3. Reischl, Kat (2017). "Вешь/Objet/Gegenstand on the International Stage (Journal of Modern Periodical Studies)". Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. 8 (2): 134–156. doi:10.5325/jmodeperistud.8.2.0134. S2CID 150257479.
  4. "Digital Collections - Modern Russian Art". Yale University Library. Retrieved February 9, 2023.
  5. Schjeldahl, Peter (January 26, 2015). "newyorker.com". The New Yorker - The Art World. Retrieved October 5, 2022.
  6. "Hitchings, Sinclair, 1933-2018". Dartmouth Library Archives & Manuscripts. Retrieved February 9, 2023.
  7. Hitchings, Sinclair (1988). "6 - American Master Prints, 1900-1950". In O'Gorman, James F. (ed.). Aspects of American Printmaking, 1800-1950. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. p. 146. ISBN 0-8156-2427-1.
  8. Marquardt, Virginia H. (17 February 1997). Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick. Smithsonian Institution Press. pp. 274–275.

Bibliography
  • Associated American Artists. (1992). Louis Lozowick : a centennial exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints: December 2–31, 1992. New York: author.
  • Flint, J.A. (1982). The prints of Louis Lozowick : a catalogue raisonné. New York: Hudson Hills Press.
  • Harnsberger, R.S. (1992). Ten precisionist artists : annotated bibliographies [Art Reference Collection no. 14]. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
  • Marquardt, Virginia H. (Ed.) (1997). Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.