Zoltan Sepeshy
American, born Hungary, 1898 - 1974Steel Mill - Zug Island, ca. 1928
Not on view
Oil on canvas
Dimensions25 × 28 in.
Courtesy of the Isabel Foundation, Inlander Collection, L2003.104
This painting portrays the loading cranes, smelting furnaces and rail tracks at a steel mill on the Rouge River near Detroit, Michigan.
Zoltan Sepeshy was born in Kassa, Hungary, in l898. He attended the Royal Academy of Art in Budapest and received degrees in art and art education. He also studied briefly in Vienna and Paris before coming to the United States in l92l. In l922 he settled in Detroit, Michigan, and took employment as an architectural draftsman. He was appointed an instructor at the School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts in l926. In l930 he became head of the painting department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He later served as the Academy's president from l947 until his retirement in l966.
Sepeshy's depictions of urban Detroit from the late 1920s exhibit a strong modernist influence. They are composed in a flat, Cubist space and are painted with bold, expressive brushstrokes. Through the 1930s and into the 1940s, Sepeshy's style became more realistic. An increasing concern with the particulars of his landscape and figure compositions prompted him to turn away from his early modernist style. During the period of the American Scene, he became best known for his luminous egg tempera paintings depicting the small towns and harbors along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.
