Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1887 Russian Empire (now Russia)

Died: 1936 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1920

Other name/s: Abrasha Lozoff

Biography

Sculptor Abraham (Abrasha) Lozoff was born into a Jewish family in Siberia, Russian Empire (now Russia) in 1887 and moved to Riga (now in Latvia) during his childhood, remaining there possibly until 1907, when he went to New York (according to other sources, he immigrated there later, in 1914). He worked first as a furrier and then as a jeweller, carrying out his first attempts at sculpture in a room fitted out as a studio behind his furrier's shop. While in New York, Lozoff obtained his first diploma at a local art school, after which he immigrated to Canada.

Lozoff later lived in Florence and Paris, where he trained under the French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle for three years, before finally immigrating to England in 1920 (Parkes 1931, p. 156). Kineton Parkes, in his book The Art of Carved Scultpure (Chapman & Hall, 1931) ranked Lozoff as one of the finest wood-carvers. Parkes explained, based on the artist’s own accounts, that Lozoff’s work was dictated in the first place by the shape of the wood, allowing knots and gnarls to suggest to him the form of the figures which eventually emerged from the wood. In his decade in England, Lozoff exhibited once with the London Group (as a non-member) at their summer exhibition in June 1926, contributing Lot and his Daughters (later donated by Lord Stieff to the Ben Uri Collection). The Observer art critic P. G. Konody described the ‘massive and compact’ wood carving as ‘the most impressive among the few pieces of sculpture’, adding that ‘it amusingly suggests a stained ivory netsuke enlarged to a half-size scale’ (Konody 1926, p. 10). The work, combining the disparate influences of Grinling Gibbons and Gauguin, as well as Oriental and African tribal carvings, depicted Lot and his daughters in sensuously elongated poses. The trio's entangled grouping not only conveyed ‘the physical acts that took place, but also the moral complexity of their interaction’ (Hajdamach, Art UK). The carving was judged by The Times to be ‘not as good as it looks, owing too much to its Far Eastern influence, though it is evidently the work of a man who knows his job’ (p. 12); It was later suggested that the Times reviewer’s reservations may have been influenced by the exceptionally high asking price of £1,500 (MacDougall 2013). In 1927 Lozoff’s large sculpture of Beethoven, carved out of the trunk of an ash tree, was displayed in the entrance to the Leicester Galleries. The Times noted that, although from the formal point of view the work was not particularly distinguished, ‘the bulk of the thing and the force of the carving make it very impressive’ (The Times1927, p. 12). In the same year, Lozoff contributed a polychrome Madonna and Child hewn out of a tree trunk to the exhibition of French and British art at the Chenil Galleries, in Chelsea.

By the late 1920s Lozoff had a studio in Ladbroke Grove in west London, on the former site of the Mercury Theatre, where he worked in a variety of materials, including plaster, wood, metal, stone and – at the time of his death – jade. Venus and Adonis (presented by Polish Jewish emigre artist, Alfred Wolmark, to the Tate in 1959) was probably created there in the late 1920s. According to Parkes, a large block of ash awakened the theme, dormant in Lozoff’s mind, of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ‘and he set to work incontinently upon the revelation of the hidden subject awaiting expression. Venus, the horse, Adonis, the bear - all were there awaiting the hand and chisel and mallet of the revealer’ (Tate catalogue entry). Lozoff’s Christ on the Road to Jerusalem was included in the Royal Academy's 1934 exhibition and singled out in the Jewish Chronicle for conveying ‘the character of the subject matter and of the medium in perfect harmony’ (Jewish Chronicle 1934, p. 35); Lozoff also exhibited with the RA in 1935. In 1934 he participated in his first Ben Uri show, contributing Lot and his Daughters and Rabbit>/em>, the latter carved out of Derbyshire spar and described by the Jewish Chroncile as ‘delightful both in its use of material and its imaginative impulse’ (Jewish Chronicle 1934, p. 33).

Abraham Lozoff died in London, England in 1936. In his obituary in the Jewish Chronicle, Louis Snowman called him 'one of our ablest sculptors, an artist with more than a touch of genius and of the greatest potentialities' (Jewish Chronicle 1936, p. 12). A posthumous exhibition of Wood Carvings by Abraham Lozoff was shown alongside Paintings & Sculpture from the Permanent Collection at Ben Uri in 1950, while Lozoff was included in many group exhibitions at Ben Uri, including a show featuring six Jewish sculptors – among them Georg Ehrlich and Jacob Epstein – in 1955. The following year his work featured in Jewish Artists in England 1656-1956, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery to mark the tercentenary of the readmittance of Jews to England under Olver Cromwell. In the UK public domain his work is represented in Ben Uri and Tate collections.
In 2024 Lot and his daughters was lent to the exhibition Sex: Jewish Positions, held at the Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Irene Iacono and Ben Uri research colleagues