Louis Lozowick

Louis Lozowick (1892–1973) 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".

Early life Lozowick was born in , Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) in 1892 to Jewish parents Abraham and Mary (Tafipolsky) Lozowick. His parents moved to Kiev when he was young, in 1903, and he attended Kiev Art School before he immigrated to the United States, where he continued his studies at the National Academy of Design (New York) and Ohio State University. In American Prints: From Hopper to Pollock the authors wrote: "With the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution he left Russia and joined his brother in America in 1906. From 1912 to 1915 he studied at the National Academy of Design, New York, followed by further studies at Ohio State University, where he graduated in 1918." In America, Lozowick became fluent in English, in addition to his native Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish.

From American Prints: From Hopper to Pollock: "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 American 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." In 1943 Lozowick moved to South Orange, New Jersey where he continued to paint and make prints. He also became a father that year, with the birth of his son Lee. The human condition remained a constant theme of his art, and an ongoing interest in nature appears more frequently in his later works. From The Prints of Louis Lozowick - A Catalogue Raisonné:

In Aspects of American Printmaking, 1800-1950, Sinclair Hitchings 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, Yasuo 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."

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