Still Life With Breakfast
Louis Lozowick (1892-1973), Still Life with Breakfast, lithograph, 1929, signed and dated (’29) in pencil lower right, numbered lower left (13/50), and titled lower margin center [with the LL monogram in the plate]. Reference: Flint 17, from the edition of 50. In good condition apart from slight light toning and toning verso, printed on an ivory/tan wove paper with the watermark FRANCE, the full sheet, 10 3/8 x 8, the sheet 15 3/4 x 11 1/4 inches.
A very good impression of this classic Precisionist composition.
According to Flint Lozowick had an edition of 50 made of Still Life with Breakfast (the print is numbered as if the edition were 50), but it seems to appear only rather rarely on the market. Unlike several of the prints Lozowick made during this period, Still Life with Breakfast was not re-printed in 1972, and so the impressions are all from the early period when Lozowick produced his American Precisionist masterpieces.
The composition of Breakfast is both realistic and fanciful; the diagonal design transversing the plate goes beyond the tablecloth at the top, and another fine design on the tablecloth lower right seems a thing apart from the tablecloth itself. A car, upper left, seems to be on the street below a window, and is still in the dark (is it early morning?).
Janet Flint noted that Lozowick used a special technique in this print to achieve the highly detailed effects in Breakfast: “The delicately textured tablecloth in Breakfast…was achieved by tracing the design through a sheet of ordinary carbon paper with an exceptionally hard lead pencil.” It was through his ability as a draftsman, and his inventiveness as a printmaker, that Lozowick was able to become America’s foremost precisionist printmaker.