- Also known as
-
Louis Lozowick
-
primary name: Lozowick, Louis
- Details
- individual; printmaker; American (USA); Male
- Life dates
- 1892-1973
- Biography
- Lozowick was born into an impoverished family of orthodox Jews in a Ukraine village. He moved to Kiev in 1903 where he enrolled at the Kiev School of Art. With the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution he left Russia and joined his brother in America in 1906. From 1912 to1915 he studied at the National Academy of Design, New York, followed by further studies at Ohio State University, where he graduated in 1918.
Lozowick's most formative years were spent in Europe from 1920 until 1924. In 1920 he lived in Paris, mixing freely with the international artistic community, and in 1922, he briefly visited Moscow, where he met Kasimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. But it was Berlin, where he lived between 1922 and 1924, which had the most profound impact in developing his machine aesthetic, initiated through his friendship with the Russian Constructivist El Lissitsky and other émigré artists. Inspired by their machine-age aesthetic, Lozowick began a series of paintings of American cities recalled from a journey he had made across America in the year prior to his departure. In Berlin he also produced his first lithographs, Cleveland and Chicago. During these years he also contributed articles and translations to the avant-garde periodical, Broom. He exhibited with Lissitsky and his circle in Düsseldorf in 1922, and had his first solo exhibitions in Berlin in 1922 and 1923.
Lozowick returned to America in 1924. Encouraged by Carl Zigrosser, director of the Weyhe Gallery, New York, he focused on making lithographs, and in 1929 Zigrosser organized his first exhibition of lithographs. Lozowick also began to attract attention as a writer. His book, Modern Russian Art, was published by the Société Anonyme in 1925 from a series of lectures he had given in New York to the Société. During the 1920s he became increasingly engaged with political issues, joining the editorial board of the left-wing periodical New Masses in 1926. In 1927 Lozowick exhibited in 'The Machine Age Exposition' in New York, which he helped to organize, and contributed a key essay to the catalogue entitled 'The Americanization of Art'. During the Depression years Lozowick was registered with the Graphic Arts Division of the WPA/FAP in New York from 1935 to 1940, apart from a secondment to the Treasury Relief Art Project, where he produced two murals of Manhattan for the New York City Post Office in 1936-7.
Lozowick continued to make prints throughout his career. In all, he made some 301 prints, nearly all in lithography, but from the 1930s social realist themes dominate his oeuvre and the prints vary widely in quality. In 1972, a year before his death, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York held a retrospective of his lithographs. His widow Adele Lozowick gave an almost complete collection of his lithographs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
- Bibliography
- Janet Flint, 'The Prints of Louis Lozowick, A Catalogue Raisonné', New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1982
Virginia Carol Hagelstein Marquardt, 'Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick', Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997
