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Edmund Lewandowski
American, 1914–1998
Great Lakes Shipbuilding
oil on canvas, 1949
30 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the Isabel Foundation, Inlander Collection, L2003.81
Edmund Lewandowski: Precisionism and Beyond
Hodge Exhibition Gallery
Sponsored By
The Judith Rothschild Foundation
&Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation
This is the first retrospective exhibition of Milwaukee-born artist Edmund Lewandowski (1914–98), the preeminent second-generation Precisionist, who achieved recognition for extending the style of Precisionism beyond the East Coast and into the Midwest, making it a national style.
For Lewandowski, a Precisionist was an artist who was engaged in painting the American scene, in an American style that was an American historical record. Following the lead of earlier Precisionists Charles Sheeler, and Niles Spencer, Ralston Crawford, and sometimes Charles Demuth, Lewandowski affirmed the importance and inspiring beauty of machinery and technology and celebrated industrial subject matter as emblematic of the modern world.
His long career, however, encompassed a wider spectrum of media and styles than just Precisionism, from representational to symbolic abstraction. In his art, he masterfully worked in drawing, watercolor, mixed media, oil, painted and mosaic murals, as well as in commercial art, and was also an influential educator. Lewandowski was inspired by industrial imagery in all his creative endeavors, as he affirmed: "My overwhelming desire… through the years has been to record the beauty of man made objects and energy of American industry."
Industrialization of Flint Flickr Group
