Draft:Landès Lewitin

Landès Lewitin (1892–1966) was an American painter, collagist, and visual theorist associated with the New York School. He was a co-founder and early intellectual figure behind The Club (fine arts), a key artists’ forum in postwar Manhattan that shaped the Abstract Expressionist movement. Lewitin participated in major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), including Sixteen Americans (1959–60) and The Art of Assemblage (1961), and received national recognition through the Hallmark Art Award in 1960. Known for his collage-based works, symbolic color theory, and use of ancient linguistic references, his work was praised by contemporaries such as Thomas Hess, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Philip Guston, but he remained largely outside the commercial gallery system.

Biography

Lewitin was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1892. He studied painting in both Cairo and Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. He immigrated to the United States in 1916 and eventually settled in Greenwich Village, New York City. His early artistic training included exposure to Symbolist and early Modernist painting, which informed his lifelong engagement with mythological and calligraphic visual vocabularies.

Lewitin was of Egyptian Jewish heritage and became a naturalized American citizen. He was married to Alice Mizner Lewitin, an arts patron and Knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, who outlived him by nearly four decades. The couple had one daughter, Margot. His great-grandniece is music journalist and entrepreneur Sarah Lewitinn.

Artistic Career

Lewitin's work spanned oil painting, pastel, collage, and elaborate color theory diagrams. He often embedded his work with hermetic symbology and lyrical, hand-written notations. He was a pioneer in experimenting with unusual materials, including the use of tiny glass beads to amplify color intensity and hand-combed pigment surfaces.

He participated in several important exhibitions, including:

• The Art of Assemblage (1961), Museum of Modern Art
• Sixteen Americans (1959–60), Museum of Modern Art
• All of the Stable Gallery Annual Exhibitions of Painting and Sculpture (1953–1957)
• Hallmark Art Award Exhibition (1960), where he was a prize recipient

Although his artistic language overlapped with the gestural abstraction of his peers, critics like Thomas Hess emphasized Lewitin's symbolic and metaphysical bent, describing him as a "visual philosopher."

Influence and The Club

Lewitin was the first-listed charter member of The Club (fine arts), a downtown New York discussion group formed in 1949 that became the intellectual hub of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Alongside Philip Pavia, he helped establish the Club’s regular debates, panels, and visiting critic sessions. Artist Jeanne Patterson Miles later recalled that “Philip Pavia and Landès Lewitin were, in a way, the backbone of the Club,” underscoring his behind-the-scenes influence.

Lewitin played a particularly important role in bridging cultural and linguistic gaps between the Club’s American-born members and a wave of European émigré artists, particularly those who had fled from Paris during and after World War II. His formative years studying and working in Paris exposed him to Symbolist painting and helped shape his metaphysical approach to abstraction. At the Club, he often served as translator, mediator, and interlocutor, enriching the Club’s discourse with a broader philosophical and historical range.

Critical Reception

While his peers gained rapid gallery representation, Lewitin's career remained largely independent. Critics such as Hilton Kramer noted the mystic symbolism and non-commercial ambition of his paintings. Although some early coverage treated his collage-based work with skepticism, he was widely respected within artistic circles. Notably, Art News recognized him in multiple issues between 1953 and 1961:

• Featured artist in the 1954 article The New York Salon by Thomas B. Hess
• Symposium contributor in “Is Today’s Artist With or Against the Past?” (Summer 1958)
• Statement contributor in “The Private Myth” (September 1961)

Legacy and Archival Efforts

Lewitin died in 1966 at age 73. He left behind an extensive archive of writings, diagrams, paintings, and unpublished poems. In recent years, his estate has initiated a digitization and cataloguing project.

Scholars have begun to reevaluate his position within mid-century American modernism, particularly as his work intersects with symbolic abstraction, poetic theory, and the metaphysical ambitions of postwar art.

Selected Works

• Innocence in a Labyrinth (1940) – Cut-and-pasted photo-engravings; Museum of Modern Art collection (Object no. 6.1948)
• Untitled (c. 1955–60) – Charcoal on paper; Museum of Modern Art collection (Object no. 418.1963)
• Forget it (c. 1954) – Oil on canvas; Hallmark Art Award winner, Hallmark Art Collection
• Knockout (1955–59) – Oil and glass on canvas; Sixteen Americans, Museum of Modern Art; cover of It Is, Vol. 1, No. 1
• Gift Bearers – Reproduced in The Grand Eccentrics (1966)

External links

• Landes Lewitin Archive on Instagram

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• 1892 births
• 1966 deaths
• American artists
• Modern painters
• Abstract expressionist artists
• Artists from New York City
• Egyptian emigrants to the United States
• Jewish American artists
• Egyptian Jews
• American people of Egyptian-Jewish descent