Essay
Tel & Tel (T & T,) a black ink lithograph on white wove paper from 1952, eloquently exhibits Lozowick’s experiences as part of intersecting Modern art movements in Europe and America. A mid-career work, Tel & Tel could be seen as a summary of Lozowick’s lithographic oeuvre. His earlier lithographs, mostly done in the 1920s and 30s, celebrate the drama and dynamism of industry and machinery. The earlier lithographs use a more sensitive palette of grey tones—the mid-30s’ prints in particular use subtle texture and high contrast to create a stark, arresting image of industrial power. The lines that fade off from the tower and turbine in Corner of a Steel Plant from 1929 borrow from Futurist techniques to show the dynamic power of the plant, for example. Some, like Queensboro Bridge (1930), read as romantic images of the modern city, while later prints, in particular Granaries of Democracy (1943), expose an anxious vision of the dystopian metropolis of the future—where concrete geometry looms over the landscape and machines seem to threaten their human makers.
Tel & Tel is a flatter image than Lozowick’s previous lithographs would predict. Lozowick maintains a high level of detail while still pursuing a simplified image. He has reduced the image to geometric forms without succumbing to total abstraction. A series of rectangles and triangles could suggest a building, and circles, lines and coils stand for floodlights, cables, and industrial springs, perhaps. The print connotes a vision of industry without explicitly portraying a manufactured structure, as Lozowick’s other work does. Here we see a successful translation of industrial tropes into semi-abstraction. Lozowick manages to play with our conceptions of industry, leaving room for the viewer’s interpretation among a collage of wires and pulleys.
The curious inclusion of a flat woodgrain rectangle and a small image of a bird perhaps show a break in the artist’s work: after all, the 1950s have come to be known as a breaking point for Modernism, and the beginning of a radically different approach to medium, reduction, and the future of art (Krauss 1985 and others). Instead of rigidly adhering to the machine aesthetic that informs much of his other work, Lozowick introduces two natural elements that have no place among these icons of industry, and thus call the totality of the machine into question. Such a break shows Lozowick’s flexibility in terms of aesthetic principle, and perhaps suggests that the artist did not fully commit himself to Constructivist and Precisionist principles—these are two movements that would not likely have tolerated such a break.
Lozowick’s earlier prints suggest a total commitment to the Modernist project—they increasingly flatten and exaggerate representations of distinctly Modern life, always pushing the image toward a more dynamic, more expressive, more pure form. Tel & Tel, by contrast, is static, schizophrenic. The work does not show a city or an object; the scale and shapes are almost completely abstract. Yet there remains some suggestion of Lozowick’s earlier work that celebrated industry: the repeated lines and “head-and-shoulders” figure shapes resemble telephone transformers and cables or telegraph wires—perhaps the “tel and tel” of the title? But, far from exposing the meaning or truth of the work, these lines of communication sink us further into confusion. We can—indeed are perhaps encouraged—to see them as representations of any industrial element. The wires seem only to be connected to themselves. It is the self-containment, the flatness of the work that is most (forgive the pun) telling. Lozowick has managed to isolate elements of Constructivist and Precisionist style—geometry, reduction, industry—but present them outside the context of Modernism. They are not part of a body of work tirelessly plodding toward the pure, Modern ideal. The work breaks from Modernism, employing multiple stylistic elements and personalities. On the one hand, the idea of industry is reduced to shapes. Yet Lozowick allows the figure of the bird to remain intact. It is possible that he wishes to disagree with the idea that, should artistic work be reduced down to “pure forms,” a perfect meaning could be found. In one print, Lozowick is both a Modernist and a dissenter. It is, finally, an exploration of style that flirts with ideology but remains, enigmatically, separate.
Curiously, Tel & Tel closely resembles the artist’s print for the stage setting of Gas, one of the first Constructivist theatre productions shown in America (Smithsonian). Theatre presents an intriguing mix of industry and play—the stage setting must hold up as a structure, yet it conceals itself as such in the service of the play. Tel & Tel is accordingly coy: is it the stage set copied, a talisman of industry, or perhaps simply a game?
-I.M.
Sources
Lozowick, Louis. Survivor from a dead age: the memoirs of Louis Lozowick.
Ed. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P. 1997. Print.
“Louis Lozowick.” The Amica Library Online. 2010. Web. 10 Dec. 2010.
“Louis Lozowick.” Keith Sheridan Fine Prints Online, Keith Sheridan Inc.
Web. 04 Feb. 2011.
“Louis Lozowick.” Hollis Taggart Galleries. Web. 10 Dec. 2010.
“Louis Lozowick.” Smithsonian American Art Museum Online. 2008. Web. 10
Dec. 2010.
“Louis Lozowick.” Wikipedia. 2010. Web. 6 December, 2010.
Suggestion from Lesley Wright concerning the “telegraph and telephone” aspect of the title of the work, October 2010.
Biography
Louis Lozowick (1892-1973), was born in Ludvovinka, Ukraine and immigrated to the United States in 1906. A graduate of the Kiev Art School, the National Academy of Design in New York, and Ohio State University, Lozowick is associated with Russian Constructivism and American Precisionism, both avant-garde modern movements that came to full flower in the 1920s, and later with Art Deco, a crossover style that permeated graphics, architecture, and industrial design. Lozowick traveled extensively between Europe and the United States in the 1920s, mingling with Dadaists, Constructivists, and other European modernist circles. While the diversity of Lozowick’s artistic adventures might give him the appearance of a dilettante—indeed the artist rarely stayed in one country for long—Lozowick’s travels allowed him to introduce various European modernisms to the United States.
A diplomat of the machine aesthetic, Lozowick is credited with helping to bring Russian Constructivism to America (Lozowick xi). His prints celebrate the machined aesthetic so loved by the Russian avant-garde, and the works predict American Precisionism—a U.S. response to the machine-inspired work of Russian Constructivists. During his later career, Lozowick turned to writing and lecturing, becoming an art advocate and educator. He assisted in the organization of the groundbreaking Machine-Age Exposition in 1927, and wrote for artistic journals for the rest of his life. Lozowick is hard to pin down artistically because he never fully committed to one modern style, the connections he drew between these movements—in art and in writing—comprise an impressive career as both American artist and international scholar of Modernism.
-I.M.
Sources
Lozowick, Louis. Survivor from a dead age: the memoirs of Louis Lozowick.
Ed. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P. 1997. Print.
“Louis Lozowick.” Wikipedia. 2010. Web. 06 Dec. 2010.
“Louis Lozowick.” The Amica Library Online. 2010. Web. 10 Dec. 2010.
