Best known for his dramatic images of factories, power plants, and bridges, Louis Lozowick celebrated America's industrial might in his Precisionist lithographs of the 1920s and 1930s. Born in Ukraine, Lozowick studied art in Kiev while still a boy; in 1906 he left Russia to join a brother in the United States. Settling in New Jersey, he worked odd jobs and later attended courses at the school of the National Academy of Design in New York City. He then entered Ohio State University, where he completed his undergraduate degree in three years. Following a brief stint with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in South Carolina, Lozowick traveled to Paris in 1919. He soon formed connections with other international artists there, particularly Russians, whose work he would champion after returning to the United States in 1924.

Although Lozowick had begun his career as a painter, he was strongly encouraged to pursue lithography by Carl Zigrosser, a print connoisseur and director of the Weyhe Gallery in New York. At the Weyhe Gallery Lozowick staged his first one-person show of lithographs in 1929. Almost immediately afterward, he won several major printmaking prizes, including a first prize of one thousand dollars in the Cleveland Print Club's International Print Competition. During the depression years, the artist worked for the Public Works of Art Project in New York and later the Graphic Arts Division of the WPA federal art project. After World War II, Lozowick wrote and lectured in addition to painting and printmaking. He traveled extensively in later years, and as Abstract Expressionism and other modern styles gave way to figurative art during the 1960s, his reputation gained renewed vigor. In 1972, the year before his death, Lozowick was elected to the National Academy of Design and given a retrospective exhibition of lithographs at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lozowick died in South Orange, New Jersey, on September 9, 1973.

Hudson Bridge (George Washington Bridge) unites two of Lozowick's favorite themes: epic construction and the soaring architecture of the modern industrial landscape. In this exultant lithograph, the east tower of the George Washington Bridge rises into a sky filled with roiling clouds and airplanes. Surmounted by a tracery of scaffolding, the huge structure puts the viewer in mind of the Tower of Babel, Egyptian obelisks, and Roman triumphal arches, all in one. A tiny train wends its way around the base, while in the distance, across the Hudson River, one can make out the bridge's west tower against the rocky escarpment of the New Jersey Palisades.

Awe-inspiring technological achievement is the broader subject of Lozowick's lithograph. With its low horizon, Hudson Bridge emphasizes the imposing height of the steel tower. The passing airplanes also allude to the "sky-high" size of the structure even as they associate it with ideas of speed and progress. In keeping with the Precisionist aesthetic espoused by Charles Sheeler (q.v.), Georgia O'Keeffe (q.v.), and others, Hudson Bridge is sharp, clean, and largely free of unnecessary detail. Rendered both pristine and monumental as a result, the bridge is transformed into a powerful icon of machine-age perfection. The clouds in the background, executed in a somewhat flat and decorative style, further enhance the iconic quality of the image. While a cautionary note may perhaps be read in the winter-blasted trees in the foreground, it seems more likely that these are, within the overall context of Lozowick's imagery, intended as signs of Nature sleeping while Man works.

Hudson Bridge was made in the same year as the infamous stock market crash that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. Although Lozowick continued to celebrate America's industrial prowess during the 1930s, he did so in a more circumspect fashion. The figures of workers become increasingly prevalent in later prints, and in some works, they entirely replace industry and technology as primary subjects. As Americans began to focus on the plight of individual workers left jobless, Socialist-Realist images of labor and personal strength grew in popularity. Images of factories, hydroelectric power plants, skyscrapers, and other manifestations of industrial power remained, but in the work of Lozowick and others, they regained their humanity.

Hudson Bridge (George Washington Bridge) was presented to the Currier Museum of Art by Stephen C. Sideris and Family in 1987.

VSD

REFERENCES

The Prints of Louis Lozowick. Ex. cat. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1983.

Louis Lozowick: American Precisionist Retrospective. Ex. cat. Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA, 1978.