Born in Ludvinovka in the Ukraine, Louis Lozowick is remembered for the richly tonal, evocative lithographs of skyscrapers, machinery, and civil and industrial constructions he created in his lifetime, a series spanning fifty years.
Lozowick attended the Kiev Art School from 1904 to 1906 before emigrating to the United States at age 14. In New York, he studied for three years at the National Academy of Design with Leon Kroll, attended Ohio State University, and between 1919 and 1924, he traveled extensively throughout Europe, particularly Paris, Berlin, and Russia. During his time in Berlin, Lozowick learned lithography and quickly became one of the city’s most highly regarded young artists most noted for his lithographs of American cities that embodied the essence of the Machine Age. Fascinated by the technical and industrial achievements of the United States, European audiences admired Lozowick’s interpretations of the geometric architecture of modern urbanity - skyscrapers, smokestacks, elevated trains, and bridges of America.
From his experiences in Europe, Lozowick wrote and published a monograph on Russian Constructivism entitled "Modern Russian Art," and once he returned to the United States, he created illustrations for the social reform periodical "New Masses." He also translated for "Broom Magazine," an international magazine of the arts that was first printed in Rome, then in Berlin, with the intention of bringing new avant-garde art back to America.
During the Great Depression, Lozowick became a muralist for the Public Works Art Project, painting his optimistic images onto city walls. Also during this period, the aesthetic of Constructivism captured Lozowick’s imagination spawning a series of drawings of machine ornaments, and he toured the country extensively making lithographs inspired by his travels including a 1932 lithograph of the Grand Canyon.
Returning to New York from Berlin in 1924, Lozowick found a city transformed by machinery, which reinvigorated his love for the American cityscape. Lozowick’s lithographs of this period feature geometrically designed scenes of New York with a focus on imagery of trains and industrial machinery. The high quality of his work and distinctly American subjects won him critical acclaim when they appeared in the Machine-Age Exposition of 1927, the first ever event designed to bring together architecture, engineering, industrial arts and modern art presented in New York.
When earlier in his career his work presented the promise of industrial machinery, following the stock market crash of 1929 Lozowick’s lithographs became more attentive to the laborers who maintained and constructed the city. Lozowick’s meticulously rendered prints of this period are today the images for which he is best known.
In "The Prints of Louis Lozowick: A Catalogue Raisonné," author Janet Flint remarks:
"A beautifully articulated synthesis of strong personal visions and an extraordinary command of black-and-white lithography remained constant. His prints have withstood the inevitable fluctuations of fashion and taste, and today are deservedly appreciated by both connoisseurs and a new generation as among the finest created in twentieth-century America."