Edmund Lewandowski (1914–1998)
Edmund Lewandowski was an important voice in the interwar Precisionist movement, before developing the magical realist themes of his work into an explicit surrealism all his own. He worked in the 1930s in illustration and advertising and joined Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery roster in 1936. The Downtown Gallery was a hotbed of Precisionism, including George Ault, Ralston Crawford, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler. Lewandowski shared with Crawford the distinction of having his career interrupted by service in the military during World War II. For his part, Lewandowski spent a portion of the war making murals, and later designed camouflage. Recent writers have described his work as “heroicizing,” [1] but in the 1940s, the otherworldly clarity of Lewandowski’s work won him inclusion in the ground-breaking Realists and Magic Realists exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

[1] Ken Johnson, “American Identity—Figurative Painting and Sculpture, 1930–1945,” The New York Times, July 11, 2003, p. E31.