Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, May 2, 2022: Louis Lozowick, a Ukrainian-born American painter and printmaker (#1560)

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.

Lozowick was born in Ludvynivka, in the Kyiv Oblast of Ukraine. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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