Alexander Levy
American, born Germany, 1881 - 1947Stamping Room - Pierce Arrow Factory, ca. 1924
Not on view
Oil on plywood
Dimensions20 × 15 in. (50.8 × 38.1 cm)
Gift of Pat Glascock and Michael D. Hall, Inlander Collection, 2003.26
Alexander Levy was born in Bonn, Germany, and later immigrated with his family to the United States, settling in Cincinnati, Ohio. Levy enrolled in the Cincinnati Art Academy and continued his studies at the New York School of Art, where he received instruction from the notable American artists William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. After school, he began exhibiting his paintings and supporting himself as a commercial illustrator in New York. In l909 he moved to Buffalo, New York, and two years later became an art director at the Larkin Soap Company. Levy’s work encompassed a variety of themes, from portraits and rural landscapes, to urban and industrial scenes. His early l920s work included scenes such as this view of workers stamping automobile parts at the Pierce-Arrow factory (a particularly important factory designed by the architect Albert Kahn) in Buffalo, New York. Levy’s factory scenes anticipated the regional industrial scenes that many Great Lakes artists would produce in the l930s and 1940s.
