Biography
Michael Loew was the son of a baker, born in New York, NY in 1907. After finishing high school, he apprenticed to a stained-glass maker and attended classes at the Art Students League from 1926-1929. He received the Sadie A. May Fellowship for studies with Charles Dufresne at the Academie Scandinave in Paris in 1929. From there he traveled to North Africa, Germany and Italy in the company of Max Schnitzler, Alfred Jensen and other artists.
Returning to New York as the Depression hit, he supported himself for awhile by selling his artwork. From 1935-1937 he was involved in New Deal projects, painting murals for the Amherst, OH Post Office (1941), the Belle Vernon, PA Post Office (1942) and several high schools. Encouraged by his wife Mildred, whom he married in 1941, Loew took a strong interest in the rights of artists and served as President of the Artists' Union.
In 1939 Loew received a commission for a mural in the Hall of Pharmacy at the New York World's Fair, which he shared with his friend Willem de Kooning. He and de Kooning remained friends for life. He traveled to Mexico and the Yucatán in 1939-1940, meeting Joseph Albers in the process.
During the War Loew served as a Battalion Painter with the U.S. Navy Seabees, documenting work at the Tinian Island airbase. That locale was later to be known as the base from which the Enola Gay took off on its fateful mission over Japan. Loew produced dozens of watercolors during this period, but lost much of his hearing in the process.
Back in the United States in 1946, Loew restarted his art studies, transitioning quickly to an abstract style. He studied post-Cubism under the GI bill at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Art in New York and Provincetown from 1947-1949. In 1948 he joined The Spiral Group, an assembly of artists dedicated to experimental art. He was also a member of the American Abstract Artists and The Artist's Club.
Loew's first one-man show was put on at The Artists Gallery in New York in 1949. From 1949-1950 he attended the Atelier Léger in Paris. He exhibited in the Stable Gallery Annuals from 1951-1955.
In 1956 Loew started teaching. He taught at the School of the Visual Arts in New York (1958-1985), the University of California at Berkeley (1960 and 1966) and the Portland Museum School. Loew purchased a cottage on Monhegan Island in 1960 and lived in New York in proximity with other Monhegan artists.
In 1964 Loew received a Ford Foundation Purchase Prize. He was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976 and a Guggenheim Foundation grant in 1979. He died in New York in 1985. His estate received a Judith Rothschild Foundation Grant in 1997.
Critical Analysis
Loew's Post Office murals are solid compositions, dominated by bold colors of red, blue and green. The Amherst, OH composition, "Pioneers Crossing the Ohio River," has a nice sense of motion, with a figure at the left pulling the raft with a rope, figures at the right propelling the raft with poles, and a woman (and cow) in the center looking ahead to the far shore, toward which several men are also pointing. The Belle Vernon, PA mural, "Men of coal and Steel," is more static, emphasizing the stature of the workmen and the massive material with which they work.
These works do not prepare one for the explosive energy of Loew's later Abstract Expressionist work. The antecedents of this work lay in the post-Cubism of Hans Hoffman and the Neo-Plasticism of Piet Mondrian and Theo von Doesburg. The strong colors that Loew prefered his murals show up again in his Hoffman-inspired abstract work. He also experimented with Mondrian-like grids, providing subtle harmonies of color in works that feel more intimate and expressive than the colder and more formal look of a Mondrian.
Murals
- Amherst, Ohio - Post Office: Pioneers Crossing the Ohio River
- Rostraver Township, Pennsylvania - Belle Vernon Post Office: Men of Coal and Steel
References
- Milena Olesińska, Abstract expressionism Michael Loew, Medium September 3 (2017).
- Michael Loew (Wikipedia).
- Michael Loew (McCormick Gallery).
- Michael Loew (Artnet).
- Michael Loew (Artsy).
- Michael Loew (askART).
- Michael Loew (Landau Fine Art).
- Michael Loew (Vallarino Fine Art).
- Michael Loew 1907-1985 (Postwar Modernism on Monhegan).
- Michael Loew papers, 1930-1997 (Archives of American Art).