Louis Lozowick (1892-1973) was born in the Ukraine and emigrated to America in 1906. However, his most formative years as an artist were spent in Europe in the early 1920s when he lived in Berlin. Inspired by the machine age aesthetic of El Lissitsky and the émigré Russian Constructivists whom he met there, Lozowick began a series of paintings of American cities recalled from memory.
On his return to America in 1924, Lozowick focused on making lithographs, and in all made some 301 prints during his lifetime. He also promoted the new machine age aesthetic in his writings. In his essay ‘The Americanization of Art’ (1927), he called on artists to depict: ‘the skyscrapers of New York, the grain elevators of Minneapolis, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the oil wells of Oklahoma …’
One of the iconic images of Manhattan, this lithograph is Lozowick’s most important print. It expresses his vision of New York as a dynamic futuristic metropolis, with its skyscraper blocks, the sweeping curves of the elevated railway, and the arc of Brooklyn Bridge lower left. Lozowick made this lithograph shortly after his return from Berlin and it borrows from the styles of Cubo-futurism and Constructivism to evoke the urban geometry of the modern metropolis.
J. Flint, The Prints of Louis Lozowick (New York, Hudson Hills Press, 1982)