From Ukraine to New Jersey:
Louis Lozowick's Prints of American Life Catalogue
Biography
by Taylor Curtis
Louis Lozowick was born in Ludvinovka, Ukraine, in 1891. At the time, Ludvinovka was a small town of about 150 families. Louis was the youngest of six - three boys and three girls - and his father was determined that one of his children would grow up to become a rabbi. As none of the other children seemed interested, Louis was his father’s last hope. He received a strict Jewish upbringing, which focused on the Hebrew language and Jewish religion. After years of study in a heder, an elementary school for Jewish children, Louis was sent to a yeshiva, a Jewish seminary. Because his father could not afford his living expenses, Louis was treated as a ward of the state. He was given old hand-me-downs and slept in a different family’s home each night. His middle brother, like all of his siblings, had moved away from his father’s house to live a more worldly life in Kiev, known as “the mother of Russian cities” for its vast amount of holy relics and churches. Hearing of Louis’ mistreatment in the yeshiva, he brought his brother, age 11 at the time, to live with him. Louis had to unlearn his strict and devout upbringing in order to adjust to his new world in the Ukrainian capital. Kiev was vastly different from the small town of Ludvinovka, where Lozowick had never seen trains, eaten anything other than kosher food, or been without his kippah. Before long, bareheaded Lozowick did not think twice before taking the train to a non-Kosher restaurant.
Under Tsarism, the law restricted Jews in many areas, including education. Once in Kiev, which was more lenient, Lozowick went to art school. He studied at the Kiev Art Institute until he left the school during the Revolution of 1905. On October 17, 1905, the government released a manifesto assuring “great freedoms of the press, assembly, conscience, organization, and the inviolability of the individual.”
An anti-Semitic group misinterpreted the meaning of this freedom, and started robbing, looting, and destroying all things Jewish. His brother, who had moved to the United States by this time, feared for Lozowick’s safety and urged him to come to America.
Lozowick, at 15 years old, came to America through Ellis Island with a small valise and 25 dollars. Initially, he lived in Newark, New Jersey, supporting himself by working at various jobs and attending Barringer High School. He subsequently attended the National Academy of Design in New York until leaving for Ohio State University, where he completed his art degree and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. While at OSU, Lozowick completed his first of many articles, “Tentative Attitudes,” which was published in 1917. In it, Lozowick wrote that “viable art must be relevant or express the relationship of humanity to the social and physical environment.” He stayed true to this philosophy throughout his artistic career. Upon leaving college, Lozowick volunteered in the Medical Corps in South Carolina. The army, in 1919, gave Lozowick the means and opportunity to travel cross country, which was of incredible importance for his artistic career as it introduced him to the American landscape and its industrial character. As it approached the 1920s, later to be called the “Roaring Twenties,” the United States was the richest country in the world. Mass demand for automobiles, movies, and radio caused industries to flourish. The American landscape was transformed as telephone lines, skyscrapers, and airplanes began to blot the skies.
In 1921, Lozowick revisited Europe. A wave of Americans were flocking to European cities hoping for a ‘grand, foreign experience’ removed from American ways, but they were disappointed to find that Europeans were entranced with all things American. European cities emulated their American counterparts in their embrace of high rise buildings, machines, outdoor advertising, and jazz. While living in Europe, Lozowick developed his own characteristic style. His artwork at this time comprised semi-abstract ink drawings of “machine ornaments” and a series of paintings of American cities--Minneapolis, New York, Oklahoma City, and Pittsburgh. Although the drawings inspired by machine forms were not uniquely American, for they were being created by non-American artists, such as Fernand Léger, as well, Lozowick clearly associated them with the United States as he believed America was in the forefront of technological advancement.
After visiting Paris, Lozowick moved to Berlin, where his artwork was seen in large German exhibitions, including the Novembergruppe, the Juryfreie Kunstschau, and the International Show in Düsseldorf in 1922. A year later, he had his second one-man show at the Galerie Alfred Heller in Berlin, which was very well received by the critics. Indeed, the exhibition generated a short but large burst of interest from the press and four notable European magazines published Lozowick’s images. Lozowick made his first lithographs, Cleveland and Chicago, in 1923 while abroad.
After moving back to New York in 1924, Lozowick lectured on modern Russian art at the Société Anonyme, which was founded in 1920 by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Katherine Dreier. The Société Anonyme was an artistic organization which organized lectures, published writings, and produced exhibitions, including the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. Dreier, with whom Lozowick had a long professional relationship, put two paintings by Lozowick in the International Exhibition. Lozowick had requested that his work be placed in the American rather than the Russian section, which suggests that he considered himself American by this time. Lozowick painted a new series of American cities as well as expanded on his series of semiabstract drawings called “Machine Ornaments”. Also in 1926, a major exhibition took place at J.B. Neumann’s New Art Circle in New York City, where the works of Lozowick and Sheeler were placed in adjacent rooms; it was one of the first instances in which Lozowick was connected with the Precisionist movement, of which Sheeler was the prominent representative.
In 1927, Dreier asked Lozowick to help with the Machine Age Exposition, which was advertised as being the “first event bringing together ‘architecture, engineering, industrial arts and modern art.” The Artists Committee for the exposition included Lozowick, Marcel Duchamp, and Charles Sheeler (fig. 1). Lozowick contributed posters for advertising, drawings for the exposition catalogue, and an essay for the catalogue, in which he proposed that “works of art could in fact assist humanity in relating to the modern machine age...” His own works were also included in the exhibition. In 1928, Lozowick left for Moscow and Paris, where he was represented in two solo exhibitions; he returned to New York in the same year. It was around this time that lithography became Lozowick’s primary medium. Elsewhere on this site, Petra Chu thoroughly covers the the lithography process and Lozowick’s mastery of the medium. Lozowick’s first one-man exhibition of lithographs occurred in 1929 at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. Soon after, he won the Cleveland Print Club’s one thousand dollar award for City on a Rock (fig. 2). It appears that Lozowick’s increased focus on lithography, since 1923, was paying off because never before had a lithograph been chosen for this award.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended the Roaring Twenties and introduced the Great Depression. Unemployment rose to twenty-five percent; cities that had once depended heavily on industry halted construction. For ten years, America experienced the most widespread depression of the 20th century. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, he launched the New Deal, a series of programs to reduce unemployment, initiate economic recovery, and prevent another depression. As unemployment persisted despite the New Deal, Roosevelt pushed a more aggressive set of programs in 1935, sometimes referred to as the Second New Deal. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was among many projects of the Second New Deal. Created to provide jobs to the unemployed, the WPA sponsored jobs that were for the benefit of the public. Each state could organize their WPA differently. New York’s WPA had subsets including the Federal Art Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Writers’ Project. Each project created numerous jobs in such diverse areas as playwriting, circus performance, gathering and transcribing oral histories, and creating public murals and sculptures. Lozowick was employed by the WPA to paint two large murals in the New York General Post Office on 8th Avenue (the murals are still in situ). Not only did the WPA give Lozowick a living between 1934 and 1940, but it also gave him the opportunity to work in print techniques other than lithography, such as wood engraving and silkscreening. Although he became skilled in these techniques, he returned to lithography after his appointment ended in 1940.
It was around this time that Lozowick joined New Masses. Though today New Masses is known as a leftist magazine representing Marxist views, at the time, it was thought of as a magazine with a variety of points of view not representing a specific party.
When Lozowick joined New Masses, he did so to express his outrage of both income inequality and the racial violence he was observing in America during the 1930s. Soon his activism started to show in the subjects of his prints, such as Lynch Law and Strike Scene, both on view in this exhibition (cat. nos. 23 and 19). These two prints are more deeply explored in the essay “Labor Strife and Lynch Law: Louis Lozowick’s Aesthetic Activism” by Jürgen Heinrichs, also on this website. Lozowick subsequently joined the John Reed Club, an organization founded by New Masses staff members to support artists and writers. The Club had a reach that extended across America and membership in it gave Lozowick an opportunity to exhibit in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Lozowick met Adele Turner, or “Dell”, in 1931 and they married that same year. He and Adele always had a nurturing relationship, especially after the patience and understanding she displayed through the lean times of the Great Depression. Louis and Adele had a baby boy, Lee, in 1943. Two years later, Lozowick, his wife, and their infant son moved from New York to South Orange, New Jersey. Adele Lozowick opened a frame shop on South Orange Avenue, which gave the couple a degree of financial stability. In the frame shop she also sold Lozowick’s prints, which caused many of them to end up in New Jersey collections. In 1947, he wrote his Credo which was his last formal statement on the nature and purpose of art. An excerpt reads:
"From the innumerable choices which our complex and tradition-laden civilization presents to the artist, I have chosen one which seems to suit my training and temperament. I might characterize it thus: Industry Harnessed by Man for the Benefit of Mankind... I have chosen an idea which seems to offer rich rewards to the creative artist if he communicates it to the spectator in the precise pictorial language appropriate to it. I cannot say in what measure I have succeeded, but it has been great fun trying."
During the last twenty-five years of his life, Lozowick’s subject matter gradually changed from American industrial landscapes and images of laborers to scenes observed during his extensive travels. As he grew older, Louis never stopped experimenting with his chosen lithographic technique. He loved texture and tone, and started to splatter his stones with tusche, the greaselike liquid used in lithography, to achieve new and interesting textural and tonal effects, as seen, for example, in the print Buddha, on view in this exhibition (cat. no. 34).
In 1960, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis included Lozowick’s prints in a Precisionist exhibition. A year later, the Zabriskie Gallery mounted a one-man exhibition of his lithographs, which reintroduced the artist to New Yorkers. Around this time, many museums started to collect prints, including Lozowick’s. In 1972, the Whitney Museum organized a large-scale retrospective of his work. The following year, Barbara Kaufman, then a faculty member at Seton Hall University, together with a group of undergraduate students, started the preparation of a one-man show of Lozowick’s prints at Seton Hall University. Students interviewed the artist extensively and photographed him in his home on Massel Terrace. Lozowick was getting ready to take a trip to Ethopia at the time; due a mandatory smallpox shot, he caught the disease and acquired the dubious reputation of being the first case of smallpox in New Jersey in many years. On September 8, even while hospitalized, Lozowick thought about his work. He asked his wife to bring two prints that needed his final approval before printing, but the next day Lozowick died. His retrospective at Seton Hall opened on October 14, 1973.
After the exhibition, Barbara Kaufmann donated all the materials her students had created (photographs and interviews) to the Archives of American Art, where they were later joined by the papers of Lozowick, donated by Adele Lozowick. Adele also donated a complete set of prints to the Smithsonian Institute, which has put a large number of them online. Today, not only the Smithsonian Institute but most major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum have Lozowick prints in their collections. The opening exhibition of the new Whitney Museum included no less than four prints by the artist.
In Europe and the United States, artists in the 1920s and 1930s explored the new “machine age” — factories, machines, high rise buildings, cars, airplanes, and the like. Some were convinced the machine would bring about humanity’s destruction; for others, technology promised order and a brighter future. In America the latter view prevailed, especially among a group called the Precisionists. Lozowick, with his “Machine Ornaments” and “American Cities,” which emphasized sleek industrial forms, was increasingly grouped with Precisionism, a movement born in American that reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s. Other artists associated with the Precisionist movement are Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, and Joseph Stella. The works of all these artists have certain aspects in common, such as clear outlines, geometric shapes, and smooth surfaces but they also differ among themselves. After Lozowick’s one-man show at J.B. Neumann’s New Art Circle Gallery, Robert Wolf of The Nation wrote, “Where Stella sees the chaotic confusion of the Machine Age, Lozowick sees its essential orderliness, its integration.”
“Industry Harnessed by Man for the Benefit of Mankind,” was Lozowick’s credo. The orderly integration of man and machine may indeed be seen as a hallmark of his art. He believed that humanity and the machine did not have to be mutually exclusive, like some artists did. Certainly Lozowick’s Credo alludes to the fact that humankind cannot be dominated or replaced by machinery, but rather that the machine, if properly used, can improve the quality of life. This outlook is at the roots of of many of his prints, such as his famous Birth of a Skyscraper on view in this exhibition (cat. no. 15). In the foreground of the painting, a laborer uses a pneumatic drill. The figure is clearly intended to be the focal point of the print as it is centrally placed and much darker than any other element in the print. Skyscraper are often portrayed as towering and distant. Yet, in this print, because it is reduced to its simplest elements and the building’s “maker” is emphasized, the importance is placed on the working man, not on the product of an industrial age. The building is entirely dependent on humanity for its creation.
Throughout Lozowick’s career, he possessed unparalleled skill as a lithographer and as an observant artist. His prints, drawings, and paintings reflect the urbanization of the United States, the connection between humans and machines, and the political and social injustices of his time. He captured the complex character of the United States through pivotal moments in history. Forty-three years after his death, we still look to his prints to shed light on these issues. From Ukraine to New Jersey: Louis Lozowick’s Prints of American Life celebrates the impact this artist made in New Jersey and worldwide.
Lozowick and Lithography
by Dr. Petra Chu
Louis Lozowick was a painter, a printmaker, and a graphic designer. Today he is probably best known for his prints. Though Lozowick practiced various print techniques, his favorite one was lithography, a method of printing from a stone (from lithos, meaning stone in Greek) that is based on the principle that oil and water do not mix. In its most basic form, the artist draws an image on the planed surface of a piece of limestone with a greasy crayon or a pen dipped in “tusche”, a greasy ink. The stone is subsequently treated with a mixture of acid and gum Arabic, which etches the stone in the areas not protected by the greasy drawing material. The etched areas of the stone become porous and absorb water. An image can then be printed off the stone by inking it with a greasy ink, which adheres to the original drawing but not to the etched parts of the stone soaked with water.
Though the principle of lithography is simple, in practice it can be a complex and cumbersome process, particularly when it comes to the printing stage. Since its invention by Alois Senefelder around the turn of the eighteenth century, artists resorted to professional lithographic printers to have the prints pulled off the stone on which they had drawn. Some did not even draw on the stone but on a piece of special paper, from which the drawing was transferred to the stone (“transfer lithography”).
Lozowick was in the habit of working directly on the stone. Like many lithographic artists, he had his own stone, which he used again and again by planing away its top layer after the prints had been pulled. He worked with several professional lithographic printers, but most frequently with Jacob Friedland in New York, who also printed the works of other artists like Charles Burchfield and Diego Rivera. When Lozowick lived in South Orange, New Jersey, he would take the train to Hoboken and the Path train to New York to deliver his stones to Friedland or another printer. Local lore has it that one day he dropped the stone in the South Orange train station, creating a dent in the station floor that presumably has remained there to this day (if only we knew which of the many dents in the floor it was!).
Many of Lozowick’s prints of the 1930s and early 1940s were the result of various New Deal initiatives, aimed at aiding artists during the Depression. These initiatives included the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Treasury Section of Printing and Sculpture (SECTION), the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), and the Federal Art Project (FAP). Other agencies, though not exclusively focused on the arts, also became involved in the arts, including the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Youth Administration (NYA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Division of Women's and Professional Projects. All these initiatives together are often referred to as “WPA,” or Works Progress Administration projects. Lozowick not only made many prints under the auspices of the WPA, but also two large murals in the James A. Farley Post Office on 8th Avenue in New York.
The prints in this exhibition demonstrate Lozowick’s mastery of the lithographic medium. Lithography allows for a broad range in value contrasts, which Lozowick knew how to use to full effect. Early prints like Hoboken (cat. no. 4) show bold chiaroscuro in the rendering of the building and the train tracks in the foreground while in the background subtle shades of grey beautifully convey the mist hanging over the river and the distant buildings. Later prints, such as Along the Tracks (cat. no. 31) demonstrate Lozowick’s interest, especially in later years, to experiment with the lithographic technique in order to achieve complex, richly textured effects.
Though the principle of lithography is simple, in practice it can be a complex and cumbersome process, particularly when it comes to the printing stage. Since its invention by Alois Senefelder around the turn of the eighteenth century, artists resorted to professional lithographic printers to have the prints pulled off the stone on which they had drawn. Some did not even draw on the stone but on a piece of special paper, from which the drawing was transferred to the stone (“transfer lithography”).
Lozowick was in the habit of working directly on the stone. Like many lithographic artists, he had his own stone, which he used again and again by planing away its top layer after the prints had been pulled. He worked with several professional lithographic printers, but most frequently with Jacob Friedland in New York, who also printed the works of other artists like Charles Burchfield and Diego Rivera. When Lozowick lived in South Orange, New Jersey, he would take the train to Hoboken and the Path train to New York to deliver his stones to Friedland or another printer. Local lore has it that one day he dropped the stone in the South Orange train station, creating a dent in the station floor that presumably has remained there to this day (if only we knew which of the many dents in the floor it was!).
Many of Lozowick’s prints of the 1930s and early 1940s were the result of various New Deal initiatives, aimed at aiding artists during the Depression. These initiatives included the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Treasury Section of Printing and Sculpture (SECTION), the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), and the Federal Art Project (FAP). Other agencies, though not exclusively focused on the arts, also became involved in the arts, including the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Youth Administration (NYA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Division of Women's and Professional Projects. All these initiatives together are often referred to as “WPA,” or Works Progress Administration projects. Lozowick not only made many prints under the auspices of the WPA, but also two large murals in the James A. Farley Post Office on 8th Avenue in New York.
The prints in this exhibition demonstrate Lozowick’s mastery of the lithographic medium. Lithography allows for a broad range in value contrasts, which Lozowick knew how to use to full effect. Early prints like Hoboken (cat. no. 4) show bold chiaroscuro in the rendering of the building and the train tracks in the foreground while in the background subtle shades of grey beautifully convey the mist hanging over the river and the distant buildings. Later prints, such as Along the Tracks (cat. no. 31) demonstrate Lozowick’s interest, especially in later years, to experiment with the lithographic technique in order to achieve complex, richly textured effects.
Labor Strife and Lynch Law:
Louis Lozowick’s Aesthetic Activism
by Dr. Jürgen Heinrichs
This text examines two works from the 1930s that provide insights into the artist’s mid-career printmaking practice. Both lithographs illustrate Lozowick’s gift of representing social and political issues of his day without reducing artworks to political statements or abandoning his quest for formal experimentation. Passionately drawn to capture mass unemployment, racial violence and other manifestations of this troubled era, the artist never relinquishes his desire to challenge the limits of the medium itself. Lozowick’s mastery of rendering social commentary in formally innovative ways illuminates the enduring beauty and political relevance of his prints.
Titled Strike Scene (cat no. 19), the 1934 lithograph represents two male figures engaged in a struggle. Lozowick conceives of this physical confrontation as an arch of human bodies balancing the scene in symmetrical fashion. On the right, a black male protester in full frontal view holds a signpost in his left hand while fending off an assault by a white policeman or uniformed guard, seen in profile on the left. Just as the aggressor’s raised baton is about to strike the worker, the latter grasps and holds the officer’s wrist so as to stave off an imminent hit. The worker defends himself while also standing tall in protecting another figure slumped to the ground behind him. The victim, apparently incapacitated, still holds on to the signpost, indicating that he may be a fellow protester. The title of the work suggests that one look at this print as a depiction of authorities breaking up a strike. Ample historical evidence of labor strife with its countless violent confrontations during the Great Depression confirms such a reading of the scene.
At the same time, Lozowick offers more than a record of social unrest as his composition and formal strategies cannot be separated from the subject at hand. The lithograph captures the moment of greatest tension between assailant and hero. The viewer witnesses the scene just as the heroic gesture of the worker averts the unfolding of further violence. Lozowick envisions this struggle by blending abstract and figurative modes of representation. Consider, for instance, the variations between the detailed facial features, the faint outlines of assailant’s uniform and worker’s overalls as well as the quasi-abstract rendering of their bodies. Utilizing black and white tonalities, the artist imbues figures with a bold, corporeal presence that evokes the Cubist experimentation and cylindrical body shapes of, say, Fernand Léger. Another noteworthy feature is the triangular constellation of figures in which the hands with their respective actions of striking or holding link the protagonists. Bodies are inextricably linked in antagonism and solidarity. Tellingly, the black worker defends a white victim as is evident in the latter’s white hand clutching the signpost. Supplementing the overt subject matter, the tonal properties of the lithographic process provide an additional layer of commentary on racial dynamics and labor relations in 1930s American society.
Made only two years later, Lozowick’s 1936 lithograph Lynching (Lynch Law) (cat. no. 23) offers a related exploration of racial violence. Here, the viewer encounters the face of a male figure in close-up fashion. The obscure background of the scene features barely recognizable trees and branches in a shadowy thicket. Objects in the background appear flat and semi-abstract, whereas the head in the foreground emerges in a three-dimensional shape. Positioned in the lower right corner and taking up only about one sixth of the representation, the head appears so close to the picture plane that it almost appears to emerge from the print. The face is brightly lit, as if illuminated by an imaginary torch. A noose around the person’s neck connects to a rope that extends upward to an invisible tree before descending again into the left background. Details such as the not-yet-tightened rope, the upright position of the figure’s head and the facial expression suggest that this man may still be alive but that his hanging death may be imminent. Noose and trees make it clear that this work depicts a lynching. Also known under the term lynch law, lynchings denoted the practice of extrajudicial killings for real, alleged or imagined crimes without due process. Thousands of lynchings occurred in the United States over decades, with peak figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Blacks accounted for the vast majority of lynching victims, even as whites, albeit in smaller numbers, also fell victim to these extrajudicial killings. The close-up appearance of the lynching victim’s face and its illumination by an imaginary torch implies a perspective that only a perpetrator or witness of such a heinous act would have had. Put another way, Lozowick’s compositional choices turns viewers of this print into potential perpetrators or witnesses of a lynching.
The widespread practice of circulating photographs of lynchings as postcards reveals the public aspect of lynching and its deep entrenchment in the fabric of American society. It is meaningful that Lozowick’s print emerged in the 1930s just as the dissemination of such visual lynching souvenirs dissipated. The lithograph takes on additional significance in light of the fact that the subject of the print has been identified as a self-portrait of the artist, an observation that print scholar Helen Langa viewed as an expression of “the artist’s empathetic response as a Jewish American to African American victimization.”¹ Viewing his work as a compassionate artistic statement of racial solidarity with blacks and class solidarity with the poor may indeed be supported by the artist’s recollections of the era’s troubling news including lynchings and Hoovervilles, shanty towns raised by homeless people in New York’s Central Park: “It represents a lynching but it is a self-portrait just the same. I cannot recall the special event or the immediate reason that may have prompted me to do the scene. The time was certainly turbulent. The depression was still on. Nazism was growing in Europe. There were Hoovervilles in Central Park (I have a lithograph on the subject). The news from the South was disturbing. I was still under the impression of news papers about a flood in Alabama where while white[s] were being rescued, blacks were callously left to drown. Whether that was the reason I could not tell. It could have been.”² Apart from an eerie foreshadowing of the racialized natural catastrophe that was to become Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Lozowick’s intriguing formal compositions already conjure up some of the early twenty-first century’s most vexing conundrums such as poverty and racial inequality with its attendant epidemic of violence targeting blacks.
1 Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 160.
2 Letter to Dr. Francis V. O’Conner, June 9, 1972, quoted in Janet Flint, The Prints of Louis Lozowick: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Hudson Hills, 1982), 119.
Titled Strike Scene (cat no. 19), the 1934 lithograph represents two male figures engaged in a struggle. Lozowick conceives of this physical confrontation as an arch of human bodies balancing the scene in symmetrical fashion. On the right, a black male protester in full frontal view holds a signpost in his left hand while fending off an assault by a white policeman or uniformed guard, seen in profile on the left. Just as the aggressor’s raised baton is about to strike the worker, the latter grasps and holds the officer’s wrist so as to stave off an imminent hit. The worker defends himself while also standing tall in protecting another figure slumped to the ground behind him. The victim, apparently incapacitated, still holds on to the signpost, indicating that he may be a fellow protester. The title of the work suggests that one look at this print as a depiction of authorities breaking up a strike. Ample historical evidence of labor strife with its countless violent confrontations during the Great Depression confirms such a reading of the scene.
At the same time, Lozowick offers more than a record of social unrest as his composition and formal strategies cannot be separated from the subject at hand. The lithograph captures the moment of greatest tension between assailant and hero. The viewer witnesses the scene just as the heroic gesture of the worker averts the unfolding of further violence. Lozowick envisions this struggle by blending abstract and figurative modes of representation. Consider, for instance, the variations between the detailed facial features, the faint outlines of assailant’s uniform and worker’s overalls as well as the quasi-abstract rendering of their bodies. Utilizing black and white tonalities, the artist imbues figures with a bold, corporeal presence that evokes the Cubist experimentation and cylindrical body shapes of, say, Fernand Léger. Another noteworthy feature is the triangular constellation of figures in which the hands with their respective actions of striking or holding link the protagonists. Bodies are inextricably linked in antagonism and solidarity. Tellingly, the black worker defends a white victim as is evident in the latter’s white hand clutching the signpost. Supplementing the overt subject matter, the tonal properties of the lithographic process provide an additional layer of commentary on racial dynamics and labor relations in 1930s American society.
Made only two years later, Lozowick’s 1936 lithograph Lynching (Lynch Law) (cat. no. 23) offers a related exploration of racial violence. Here, the viewer encounters the face of a male figure in close-up fashion. The obscure background of the scene features barely recognizable trees and branches in a shadowy thicket. Objects in the background appear flat and semi-abstract, whereas the head in the foreground emerges in a three-dimensional shape. Positioned in the lower right corner and taking up only about one sixth of the representation, the head appears so close to the picture plane that it almost appears to emerge from the print. The face is brightly lit, as if illuminated by an imaginary torch. A noose around the person’s neck connects to a rope that extends upward to an invisible tree before descending again into the left background. Details such as the not-yet-tightened rope, the upright position of the figure’s head and the facial expression suggest that this man may still be alive but that his hanging death may be imminent. Noose and trees make it clear that this work depicts a lynching. Also known under the term lynch law, lynchings denoted the practice of extrajudicial killings for real, alleged or imagined crimes without due process. Thousands of lynchings occurred in the United States over decades, with peak figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Blacks accounted for the vast majority of lynching victims, even as whites, albeit in smaller numbers, also fell victim to these extrajudicial killings. The close-up appearance of the lynching victim’s face and its illumination by an imaginary torch implies a perspective that only a perpetrator or witness of such a heinous act would have had. Put another way, Lozowick’s compositional choices turns viewers of this print into potential perpetrators or witnesses of a lynching.
The widespread practice of circulating photographs of lynchings as postcards reveals the public aspect of lynching and its deep entrenchment in the fabric of American society. It is meaningful that Lozowick’s print emerged in the 1930s just as the dissemination of such visual lynching souvenirs dissipated. The lithograph takes on additional significance in light of the fact that the subject of the print has been identified as a self-portrait of the artist, an observation that print scholar Helen Langa viewed as an expression of “the artist’s empathetic response as a Jewish American to African American victimization.”¹ Viewing his work as a compassionate artistic statement of racial solidarity with blacks and class solidarity with the poor may indeed be supported by the artist’s recollections of the era’s troubling news including lynchings and Hoovervilles, shanty towns raised by homeless people in New York’s Central Park: “It represents a lynching but it is a self-portrait just the same. I cannot recall the special event or the immediate reason that may have prompted me to do the scene. The time was certainly turbulent. The depression was still on. Nazism was growing in Europe. There were Hoovervilles in Central Park (I have a lithograph on the subject). The news from the South was disturbing. I was still under the impression of news papers about a flood in Alabama where while white[s] were being rescued, blacks were callously left to drown. Whether that was the reason I could not tell. It could have been.”² Apart from an eerie foreshadowing of the racialized natural catastrophe that was to become Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Lozowick’s intriguing formal compositions already conjure up some of the early twenty-first century’s most vexing conundrums such as poverty and racial inequality with its attendant epidemic of violence targeting blacks.
1 Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 160.
2 Letter to Dr. Francis V. O’Conner, June 9, 1972, quoted in Janet Flint, The Prints of Louis Lozowick: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Hudson Hills, 1982), 119.