Michael Loew
Michael Loew
1907-1985
Education:
Art Students League, 1926-1929
Academie Scandinave, Paris, 1930
Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, 1947-1949
Atelier Leger, Paris, 1950
Orthon Frieze, Paris
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
1949 Artists Gallery, New York City
1956 Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
1959 T.K. Gallery Provincetown, MA
1959, 57, 55, 53 Rose Fried Gallery, New York City
1959 Two Man Show, Loew & McNeil, Rutgers University
1960 Holland Goldowski Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
1965, 62, 61 Stable Gallery, New York City
1966, 60 University of California, Berkeley
1976, 73 Landmark Gallery, New York City
1984, 82, 81 ,79, 77 Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1986 Marilyn Pearl Gallery, Memorial Exhibition, New York City
1987 Paintings from the Eighties, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1989 Michael Loew: Early Work, 1929-1955, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1990 Michael Loew: Serene Genius in Retrospect, Landau Fine Art, Montreal, Canada
1997 Monhegan Island Museum, Monhegan, Maine
1997 Farnsworth Museum, Rockland Maine
2005 Towards Geometric Abstraction, Acme Fine Art Gallery, Boston, MA
2008 Michael Loew: En Plein Air, Acme Fine Art Gallery, Boston, MA
2009 Works on Paper from the 1940s and 1950s, Meredith Ward Fine Art Gallery, New York City
Selected Group Exhibitions:
1950 New England Painters, Farnsworth Museum
1950 Painting Annual, Whitney Museum, New York City
1950 American Abstract Artists Exhibition, Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam
1951-56 New York Artists Annual, Stable Gallery, New York City
1952 American Watercolors, Drawings, Prints, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
1953 The Classic Tradition in American Painting, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
1955 Glarner, Loew, Yunkers and Vincente, Rose Fried Gallery, New York City
1955 Four Man Show, Rutgers University
1957 Contemporary American Painting, International Association of Plastic Arts, Traveling exhibition
1957 Collage in America, Zabriksie Gallery, New York City
1958 Collage in America, American Federation of Arts, Traveling exhibition
1959 Loew & McNeil, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
1959 Art USA, NY Coliseum
1960 The Calculated Image, Morgan State College
1961 Painting Annual, Whitney Museum, New York City
1961 Contemporary Painting from 1960-61, Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
1962 Geometric Abstraction in America, Whitney Museum, New York City
1963 Hans Hofmann and his Students, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Traveling exhibition
1964 67TH Annual American Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago
1965 Maine: 50 Artists of the 20th Century, American Federation of Arts, Traveling exhibition
1966 American Painting and Sculpture, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia
1967 Selection 1967: Recent Acquisitions in Modern Art, University of California, Berkeley
1971 The Ciba-Geigy Collection, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
1973 The Ciba-Geigy Collection, University of Texas, Austin
1975 American Abstract Painting 1939-75, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
1976 Works on Paper, Museum Art Center, Wichita Falls, Texas
1977 New Deal Art, The Gallery Association of New York State, Traveling exhibition
1977 Works on Paper from the Ciba-Geigy Collection, Neuberger Museum, State University of New York
1977 Geometric Abstraction: Paintings of the Fifties, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1977 Selections from the Lawrence H. Bloedel Bequest, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
1978-79 Geometric Abstractions and Related Works, Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey
1979 The Language of Abstraction, Betty Parsons Gallery and Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1980 The Dawn of a New Day: New York World’s Fair 1939-40, Queens Museum, Flushing, New York
1980 The Geometric Tradition in American Painting, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1981 American Abstract Artists: Abstraction in Action, City Gallery, New York City
1981 American Artists in the Gallatin Collection, Washburn Gallery, New York City
1981 Aspects of Abstraction, Rice University, Houston, Texas
1981 Annual 118th Artists Invitational, Landmark Gallery, New York City
1982 Hans Hoffman as a Teacher: Drawings by Hans Hoffman and Students, American Federation of Arts
1983 Vintage New York, Contemporary Art at One Penn Plaza, New York City
1983 Paintings of the Fifties, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1983-84 Twentieth-Century American Watercolor, Gallery Association of New York State
1984 Maine Drawing Biennial, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
1984 American Post-War Purism, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1985 The Severe & the Romantic: Geometric Humanism in American Painting, the 1950’s and the 1960’s
1985 Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York City
1985 Crossovers, Suzanna Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont
1985 Abstractions, Maine Coast Artists, Rockport, Maine
1987 Looking at the WPA: Mural sketches and Other Works from the 1930’s, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, NYC
1987 Recent Acquisitions, Guggenheim Museum, New York City
1988 American Art of the Nineteen-Thirties, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Satellite Gallery, Bronx, New York
1989 Straphangers, Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris, New York City
1989 Abstraction, Geometry, Painting: Selected Geometric Abstract Painting in America Since 1945
1989 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
1997 Artists of the 50’s, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York City
1998 Ernest Briggs & Michael Loew, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York City
1999 Loew & 4 others, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York City
1999 Loew & Artists of the 50’s, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York City
1999 Development of Abstraction (continued), Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York City
2000 Maine and the Modern Spirit, Katonah Museum, Katonah, New York
2000 Art for Art’s Sake, Credo of the 50’s, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York City
2001 Group Show, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, NYC
2005 Pioneers of Modernism, Acme Fine Art Gallery, Boston, MA
2006 Geometry and Abstraction, Acme Fine Art Gallery, Boston, MA
2007 Maine Modern Two, Acme Fine Art Gallery, Boston, MA
2012 Provincetown Views, Acme Fine Art Gallery, Boston, MA
Selected Collections:
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX
Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI
Whitney Museum of American Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gallatin Collection
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
Sheldon Memorial Museum, Lincoln, NE
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Hampton Institute, Virginia
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
Tel Aviv Museum, Israel
Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA
University of St. Lawrence, Canton, NY
University Art Museum, University of California, Berkely, CA
Gallery of Contemporary Art, University of Atlanta, GA
Wichita State University, Wichita Falls KS
Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Calcutta, India
Ciba-Geigy Corporation, NY
Union Carbide, New York City
Lehman Brothers, New York City
Carona-Mass, Publications, MA
Southeast Banking Corp., Miami, FL
Chemical Bank, New York City
Monhegan Island Maine Museum, ME
Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME
Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York City
John Day, ME
William & Elaine De Kooning
Werner & Gabrielle Merzbacher, Switzerland
Robert Landau, Montreal, Canada
Rosalie & Remsen Wood, Baltimore, MD
Awards and Fellowships:
Sadie A. May Fellowship, 1929
Commission for Hall of Pharmacy, New York World’s Fair with Willem de Kooning, 1939-1940
Honorable Mention (twice in succession), National Mural Competition of U.S. Treasury Department, 1941, 1942
Commissioned by Treasury Department to paint murals for post offices in Amherst, Ohio, and Belle Vernon, PA, 1941, 1942
Ford Foundation Purchase, 1964
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, 1976
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1979
Judith Rothschild Grant, 1997
Teaching Positions:
Portland Museum School, Portland, Oregon, Visiting Professor, 1945-1957
University of California, Berkeley, Guest Artist, 1960, 1966
School of the Visual Arts, New York City, 1958-1985
Biography:
Michael Loew was born in 1907 and was the son of a New York City baker. After high school, he was an apprentice to a stained-glass maker, and from 1926-1929, he studied at the Art Student’s League.
In 1929, he traveled to Paris, North Africa, Germany, and Italy with a group of artists, including Max Schnitzler and Alfred Jensen. When he returned to New York City in 1931, the Great Depression hit Loew unexpectedly, and for the next two years he paid his apartment rent with his paintings. In 1935, he found work with the WPA where he painted murals and partnered up with longtime friend Willem de Kooning in 1939 on a mural for the Hall of Pharmacy at the New York World’s Fair. Their friendship lasted for the rest of their lives and, in fact, Loew met his wife Mildred through a friend of de Kooning’s.
Loew had a strong interest in artists’ rights and activism, and as president of the Artists’ Union, he led a protest which involved artists chaining themselves to poles in Union Square. After Pearl Harbor, Loew joined the Navy and served as the battalion artist for the “Seabees” in the Pacific.
When he returned in 1946, his painting moved quickly toward abstraction. From 1947-1949, he studied post-Cubism at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. In 1948, he joined the Spiral Group, an organization of artists devoted to the exhibition of experimental art. The Artists Gallery in New York hosted his first one-man show in 1949, and one year later, he enrolled at the Atelier Leger in Paris.
In 1956, he began teaching in the United States. By 1985 he had been an instructor at the Portland Museum School, University of California at Berkeley, and the School of the Visual Arts, NYC.
His works are in the collections of prominent institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Most recently, his work was featured in an exhibit at Anita Shapolsky Gallery. In 2007 the McCormick Gallery and Vincent Vallarino Fine Art mounted an exhibition and published a 56 page catalog with an essay by April Kingsley on Loew’s work.