Minneapolis

Between 1922 and 1927, Louis Lozowick created a group of paintings, drawings, and prints known as the Cities series. Inspired by a trip across the United States in 1919, the works depicted urban scenes he encountered in such cities as New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and Seattle. This 1925 lithograph, one of the artist's earliest known prints, shows an abstracted view of Minneapolis, with a riverfront dominated by railroads, factories, and grain silos. Fascinated by the underlying structure of industrial and urban architecture, Lozowick pictured a semiabstract, geometric image of the uninhabited metropolis. The striking composition reveals the influence of the geometric abstractions and machine aesthetic of Futurism and Constructivism, conveyed to him by artists he met in Paris and Berlin during the early 1920s.