Michael Loew (1907 – 1985)
Concert
28 3/4 x 43 1/4 inches
Oil on canvas
Signed lower right, and signed, titled and dated 1928 verso.

BIO:
Michael Loew (1907 – 1985) 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 Students League. In 1929, he traveled to Paris, North Africa, Germany, and Italy with a group of artists. 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. In the mid-30’s he painted in Mexico and the Yucatán documenting the construction of a U.S. 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. 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 and he studied under Hans Hoffman. The Artists Gallery in New York hosted his first one-man show in 1949, and one year later, he studied with Fernand Leger in Paris. In 1956, he began teaching in the United States. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists group. 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, Guggenheim, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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