Edmund Lewandowski

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A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Edmund Lewandowski attended the Layton School of Art from 1931 to 1934 and studied painting.

Lewandowski worked briefly as a public school teacher and good fortunes began to happen in 1936, when he was invited by Edith Halpert to show his paintings at her gallery in New York. Her gallery gave Lewandowski crucial exposure to the New York art world.

That same year, he was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration to execute murals for post offices in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota. At the same time, the art critic Constance Rourke, writing in The New Republic, singled Lewandowski out as one of the best young artists in the Federal Art Program, and he was included in a major W.P.A. exhibition held at the Phillips Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Lewandowski spent the war years producing maps for the United States Air Force and after the Air Force, he joined the Layton School as a faculty member. For a short time Lewandowski moved to Florida in 1949 to teach at Florida State University but returned to the Layton School in 1954 to become director. In 1973,Lewandowski became the chairman of the art department at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, from which he retired in 1984. Lewandowski continued painting until his death in 1998.

It is part of a series of paintings Lewandowski called the “Farmscapes of the Midwest,” which were inspired by agricultural industry sites around the state of Wisconsin.

Edmund's early work captured rural Wisconsin landscapes, and In 1946, he was commissioned by the Container Corporation of America to paint a composition “interpreting Wisconsin.” His focus on Midwestern industrial buildings and machinery places him alongside other such notable Precisionist painters as Preston Dickinson, Niles Spencer, and Ralston Crawford.

In his latter years, Lewandowski worked in a Precisionist idiom similar to that of Charles Sheeler. Sheeler incorporated photography into his work, translating elements of photographs into carefully constructed modernist paintings.  

Photo credit: April 14, 1940 Wisconsin Historical Society.