Structural Steel System

Edmund Daniel Lewandowski

Precisionist Edmund Lewandowski’s “Structural Steel System” shows the artist in his element, having begun to strip away superfluous detail to achieve the sharpest, most defined depictions of human architectural feats. Though he had found a great deal of success - even during the Depression - with his American Scene paintings, it was his penchant for impersonal, hard-edge, industrial compositions that drew the eye of dealers and collectors in the 1930s. By the 1950s, he had found his stride.

This screenprint, precursor to a painting he executed in 1960, makes good use of a small scale matrix to communicate the power and beauty of industry. Of particular significance is his use of unusual, vivid colors - purple, plum, tomato red - to juxtapose what is traditionally a drab and utilitarian element of architecture: steel framing. Lewandowski portrays not only the structure as an object of beauty but as a celebration of what modern humans have achieved.