Michael Loew

Michael Loew (1907-1985) was an important Abstract Expressionist who got his start working for the New Deal art projects between 1933 and 1937, one of the many American artists whose careers were sustained through the Depression years by government support for the arts. He initially worked in watercolor, and during the Second World War he traveled to Mexico and the Yucatán as a Battalion Painter to document the progress of construction of a United States naval airbase on Tinian Island. It was from this airbase that the Enola Gay bomber jet would later take off to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here Loew refined his aesthetic sensibility and his mastery of paper media, producing a substantial body of watercolors that captured the extraordinary circumstances of his wartime assignment.

After returning to the United States, Michael Loew studied under Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, absorbing the celebrated German-American master's principles of color and structural composition. He also studied with Fernand Léger in Paris, an experience that connected him to one of the central figures of European modernism and gave him direct exposure to the sculptural, mechanical vocabulary of Léger's mature work. These two teachers, one committed to the dynamic interplay of color planes and the other to the modernist reimagining of everyday forms, shaped Loew's mature artistic voice at every level.

Loew became a member of the American Abstract Artists group, joining the collective that had done so much to establish abstract art within the American mainstream, and he showed at the important Stable Gallery Annuals from 1951 to 1955, the exhibitions that helped define the New York School during its formative moment. His mature paintings are characterized by their careful geometric structure, luminous color, and a distinctive synthesis of Hofmann's push-pull principles with Léger's more architectural sensibility. Loew taught for many years at the School of Visual Arts in New York, mentoring generations of younger painters. His work is held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan, and other major American collections.