Louis Lozowick was born on this date in 1892 in what is now Ukraine. He came to the U.S in his early teens, studied at the @natlacademy with @monheganmuseum painter Leon Kroll, among others, and became known for what he called his “machine ornaments”, abstractions of mechanical geometries for lithographic reproduction. Thanks to his move to neighboring South Orange in mid life, The Newark Museum had a sustained relationship with Lozowick and owns eleven of his paintings and prints including this casein and black ink painting, 1949’s ‘The Relic’. As correspondence with the artist clarifies, this object refined and improved upon an earlier lithograph, ‘Tanks’, as an experiment with the tricky medium of casein paint, made with milk protein. In that letter in the object file, he writes: “As for my views on art in general - they might be stated most simply by a somewhat mixed metaphor. Point of departure - the real, the objective world. Transfer Station where the raw material borrowed from the objective world is molded, changed, hammered into form appropriate to the subject chosen and the goal set. Point of destination - distant, forbidding, evocative world of art. Whether and how often the journey was fruitful or successful I do not know, but it has been great fun travelling.”