Cityscape / Industrial
EDMUND D. LEWANDOWSKI (1914–1998)
Steel and Gray, 1956
Oil on Masonite, 48 x 18 in.
Signed and dated (at lower right): E. D. LEWANDOWSKI 1956
EX COLL.: the artist; to Morton P. Rome, Wyncote, Pennsylvania; to his widow, Margorie T. Rome, Wyncote, Pennsylvania, 1980; to her daughter, by descent, 2003 until the present
Lewandowski painted Steel and Gray in 1956, in a period that marked his closest approach to abstraction. From 1956 to 1958, Lewandowski was involved in the design and production of mosaic murals for the new, emphatically modernist home of the Flint Institute of Arts in Flint, Michigan. Flint, 66 miles northwest of Detroit, was the home of the General Motors automobile company whose factories turned out Buicks and Chevrolets. Lewandowski’s designs for the art museum murals, translated into mosaic form, echoed the architecture of the building. The major financial support for the Institute’s new campus came from the leaders of General Motors. Lewandowski responded in his art with abstract images intended to echo the energy and dynamism of the automobile factories and their influence on Flint. In Steel and Gray Lewandowski stayed true to his precisionist roots but veered from his earlier photographic fidelity to the industrial landscape to a study of the geometric interplay of line, shape, and color deliberately composed to evoke steel girders. Steel and Gray reads as a construction scene with the girders on the viewers’ right appearing to be in the foreground while the left side of the panel recedes into distance. Upon further examination, the image does not, however, correspond to any recognizable structure, but reveals itself as a pleasing and varied rhythm of interlocking straight line shapes delineated by color. Just as Steel and Gray does not represent a departure in subject, it is also a point on a continuum of stylistic exploration.
