Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:
Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York
Private collection, New York, 1981
By descent in the family

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1914, Edmund Lewandowski received his formal art training from renowned regionalist painter and theorist Gerrit Sinclair at the Layton School of Art. Studying there from 1931 to 1935, Lewandowski became well versed in formalist art theory and was also inspired by Cubism. His works, which combined an interest in rigid geometric shapes and a love of Wisconsin, drew the notice of the New York art dealer Edith Halpert, who organized the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Downtown Gallery in 1937.

During the Great Depression, Lewandowski worked under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, creating a number of murals for post offices in Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin. In 1943, his work was featured in the groundbreaking Museum of Modern Art show Realists and Magic Realists. He remains today a well-known painter of the American Precisionist movement, a group that featured such prestigious artists as Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe and Charles Demuth. The Precisionists, who sought to simplify their subjects to essential geometric forms, heralded the utilitarian nature of American architecture and the country’s technological advancements.

In 1945, Lewandowski left the United States to serve in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Upon returning in 1946, he produced some of the finest paintings of his career, including Ventilators. Characterized by increasingly angular, geometric delineations, these later works still maintain the artist’s earlier focus on the American landscape. Exemplifying his interest in the country’s industrial infrastructure, Ventilators depicts three metal mechanisms reduced to a series of trapezoids, triangles and rectangles.

This meticulously painted composition has a crisply defined and flawless finish, with virtually no evidence of the painter’s brushwork or the difficult planning and execution involved in creating it. The three ventilators are isolated against a flat, planar background, focusing the viewer’s attention on the formal beauty of a composition created by only four shades of color: blue, cream, black, and grey. The treatment of the machines seems remote but also nostalgic—the ventilators’ presence recognizes the progress of technology, while the machines are made accessible to the viewer by their reduction to simplified elements. A visually captivating work from Lewandowski’s finest years, Ventilators epitomizes a period in the artist’s career that featured remarkably complex images of America, ranging from pristine farmhouses to industrial structures, rendered in an abstract style.