New York

New York exploits a range of tonal blacks and overlapping forms to depict the utilitarian factory buildings, tank structures, bridges, and curving El tracks interspersed within a metropolitan mass of soaring skyscrapers and apartment buildings. Part of a group of related drawings, lithographs, and paintings, this work was inspired by Louis Lozowick’s five-year sojourn in Europe, which began in 1919. While in Berlin, he came into contact with the art and theories of the Russian Constructivists and other avant-garde movements of Central and Eastern Europe, many of which were concerned with expressing the energy of modern technology and urban life. Lozowick returned to New York in 1924, convinced that the industrial complex of the city was the quintessential subject for contemporary American art, and he delighted in giving form to its geometries: “the verticals of its smoke stacks…the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arc of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks. . .” (Whitney Museum of American Art)