The Daily Worker Newspaper, March 20, 1926, Page 12

- Lozowick: Revolutionary Artist By Joseph Freeman. if igpar prophetic eyes of Marx fore- saw that art could not long escape the effects of machinery and the fac- tory system. He posed the. problem, and answered it, fifty years before the painters and poets of Europe became aware that the revolution in produc- tion demanded a revolution both in the content and form of their arts. In the “Critique of Political Economy” Marx asked: “Is the view of nature and of social relations which shaped Greek imagination and Greek art possible in the age of automatic machinery, and railways, and lo- comotives, and electric tele- graphs? . .. All mythology mas- ters and dominates and shapes the forces of ‘nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature. What becomes of the Goddess Fame side by side with Printing House Square (or Times Square)? » « « Looking at it from another side: is Achilles possible side by side with powder and lead? Or is the Illiad at, all comparable with the printing press and steam press?” Long after Marx’s general view- point became a dynamic factor in the political and economic life of the world, painters continued to evade the mechanical world about them. Their revolt against the ugliness of factory towns manifested itself in landscape paintings; it is a noteworthy fact that not until the rise of the dirty factory town did western European painters discover the profuse beauties of the country. They sought relief from smokestacks in trees, from trains in birds, from slums in fields. Con- sciously or unconsciously‘the “mythol- ogy” (i, e., weltanschauung) of 19th century painters was derived from Rousseau and the classical political economists. Its keystone is laissez faire; its aesthetic maintains that the artist .is .a. divine, unique creature, above social classes and unconcerned with the contemporary world. His chief subjects are nature and the in- dividual man, By the first decade of the 20th cen- tury machinery had so transformed the western world that the sysmo- graphic temperaments among bour- geois artists could no ‘longer fail to register the earthquake that had been shaking the world for over a century. Futurism, cubism and other move- ments attempted to break away from the traditions of representation and agriculture in painting, and to achieve abstraction in form and modernity in content. These early revolutions in art were one-sided; they were general strikes whose force was concentrated on this or that isolated factor of the old aesthetic. They succeeded in weak- ening the old traditions. They were also rich experiments, containing the germs of principles which had yet to be grasped and synthesized. They ‘were, so to say, the “1905” of modern painting, a preparation for the more significant “1917.” * HE first American synthesis of modern tendencies in painting has been made by Louis Lozowick, whose canvasses and drawings have just been exhibited in New York. Without attribufing any mystical significance to “innate racial tendencies,” it is nevertheless interesting to observe that Lozowick is a Jew of Russian birth and American education. The importance of this personal organiza- tion of backgrounds is reflected— among other qualities—in the power- ful and original work “of the artist. His,subject matter is American; his weltanschauung .is permeated with the revolutionary ideas which histori- cally have been most vital in Russia. To understand the importance of Lozowick in American art it is neces- sary to realize that here we have a painter who is conscious, and delib- erate in his work. He combinés in- tellect with craftemanship; he thinks pot with his hands alone, but is capa- ble of advancing the theories of his ert, and to grasp the true relation of ee LT A Revolutionary Scrubbing ( ; art in general to society in general. There is a tendency among Ameri- can art critics to consider that “love for the remote” is the essential char- acteristic of the American artist. Both in theory and in his remarkakle paintings, Lezowick stands not for the remote, but for the immediate: for the visible world of machinery, sky- serapers, cities. His mind is steeled by Marxism. This in itself, of course, is not sufficient to make a man a ‘reat painter; but it has its effect on his thought, subject matter, form, and ittitude toward his work. As opposed to the bourgeois notion of the artist as a priest (a notion maintained partly as a compensation for the mis- erable pay doled out to genuine art- ists in capitalist civilization) Lozo- wick is one of those who looks on the artist as a worker. Cn aaa! In this, and in his respect for crafts- manship, Lozowick has qualities in art equivalent to the qualities ex- hibited by the advanced proletariat in society. other painters who have tried to adapt modern forms to modern sub- jects; for whereas these see in the metropolis, factory and street nothing but confusion, chaos and contradic- tion, Lozowick sees underneath these superficial aspects the essential order and organization inherent in machine civilization as such, Lozowick is permeated by the sig- nificant forces of the 20th century. He has not tried to evade them; in- stead he has understood them, ac- cepted them, and found an aesthetic equivalent for them in painting. Against the old art of sentimental- ism, adoration of the individual, in- trospection and nostalgic longing for He is thus poles apart from |, the past, he represents an art that is impersonal, collective, precise, and objective; in this he is as truly rép- resentative of the scientific spirit of this age as the medieval painters of the metaphysical spirit of their age. Having realized the basic fact that a living art must seek its content and form in the living world, Lozowick has gone for the content of his paint- ings to the American city which repre- sents the highest advance so far of machine civilization. His themes are the skyscrapers of New York, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the grain elevators of Minneapolis, the copper mines of Butte, the lumber yards of Seattle, ‘These canvasses of cities— no two of them alike—are thoroughly saturated by the terrific energy of modern America, its gigditic engi- neering feats and collossal mechani- cal constructions, In his critical writ- ings Lozowick has stated his position clearly enough. He declares: “Every epoch conditions the art- ist’s attitude and the manner of his expression very subtly and in de- vious ways. He observes and ab- sorbs environmental facts, social currents, philosophic speculation and then chooses the elements for his work in such fashion and fo- cuses attention on such aspects of the environment as will reveal his own aesthetic vision, as well as the essential character of the en- vironment which conditioned it. “The dominant trend in Amer lea today, beneath all the ap- parent chaos and confusion, is to- wards order and organization which find their outward sign and symbol in the rigid geometry of ‘the American city, in the verticals fe rsa a he ° ™ \ es f q iy ie f ‘ N Hoping Pneumonia and Flu will follow the bath, with fatal results. of its smokestacks, the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its ficto- ries, the arcs of its bridges, the gylinders of its gas tanks.” The clarity of Lozowick’s critical perceptions is matched by the superb craftsmanship which he brings to his painting. With a mathematical pat- tern as a basis, he builds up paintings that at once contain the appearance of American cities and capture their titanic rhythm. The paintings are architectural, giving the effect of plans for vast building projects. They are also representative, having asso- ciative elements which make it easy to recognize New York or Pittsburgh or Cleveland. At the same time they have purely formal, plastic qualities; the arrangement of masses, lines, planes and colors make them ‘4elf- contained works of art. . Many artists who are bourgeois in their ideaology are breaking under the strain of the contradictions be- tween the old art and the new ma- chine civilization, Lozowick stands in the first rank of those who have solved this conflict by evolving an art based on machinery. He has ‘thus been able to solve the subsidiary con- flict between “pure” art and “com © mercial” (i, ¢., practical) art. Far from despising practical art, he has carried his theories to one of their logical conclusions by creating de signs for posters, theatres, advertis- ing, magazines, etc. which are based on various elements of the machina In the field of applied design of a ~ purely modern character he has been a pioneer; in his whale outlook, his themes, his form, he is @ revolution ary in the truest sense,