Edmund Lewandowski (1914 - 1998)

16. Structural Steel Systems, 1960, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 38 x 25 inches, label verso with artist’s name, title, medium, size and date, exhibited: Edmund Lewandowski, Recent Works Plus, Center for the Arts, Rock Hill SC, 1996, provenance includes Keogh & Riehlman Fine Art, New York, NY (label verso) and John Eckel

$15,000 

Edmund Lewandowski was among the best of the second-generation Precisionists. He is credited with extending Precisionism to the Midwest and successfully evolving the style into the 1980s and 1990s with his Neo Immaculate works. 

Lewandowski was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and studied at the Layton School of Art with Garrett Sinclair. He achieved early success in 1936 when two of his watercolors were shown at the Phillips Collection as part of a Federal Art Project exhibition. Then, in 1937, his work was first exhibited at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery which represented Lewandowski into the 1950s. Under Halpert’s guidance, Lewandowski continued to explore watercolor as his main medium during the 1930s and 1940s, since the gallery already represented Charles Sheeler, who worked primarily in oils. Sheeler became Lewandowski’s major influence as the primary leader of the ill-defined, but very recognizable Immaculate School artists, which included other Downtown Gallery painters, Niles Spencer, George Ault, and Ralston Crawford, as well as Charles Demuth and Preston Dickinson, both of whom died at a young age and had been represented by the Charles Daniel Gallery. Sheeler is credited with giving Lewandowski technical advice on how to make his paintings more precise and by all accounts, Sheeler was a supporter of Lewandowski’s work. 

Through the Downtown Gallery, Lewandowski’s paintings were accepted into major national and international exhibitions and purchased by significant museums and collectors. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller acquired works by Lewandowski. He was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s important 1943 exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists as well as juried exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Lewandowski also completed commissions for magazines during the 1940s and 1950s, including several covers for Fortune. Throughout his career, Lewandowski explored urban and rural architecture, industry, machinery, and nautical themes. Looking back on his career, Lewandowski wrote, “My overwhelming desire as an artist through the years has been to record the beauty of man-made objects and energy of American industry on canvas. For as far back as I can recall, the cityscapes, farms and depictions of industrial power and technological efficiency have had a great attraction for me. I try to treat these observations with personal honesty and distill these impressions to a visual order.” 

Late in his career, Lewandowski enjoyed a resurgence of popularity as he was represented during the 1980s by New York’s Sid Deutsch and Allison Galleries before joining Keogh & Riehlman during the 1990s. Lewandowski’s work was the subject of a retrospective, Edmund Lewandowski Precisionism and Beyond, organized by The Flint Institute of Arts in 2010. That exhibition traveled to the Mobile Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art and Winthrop University Galleries.